https://www.rt.com/news/332162-gravitational-waves-discovery-announcement/Scientists at Washington’s National Science Foundation and Moscow State University have confirmed the discovery of Albert Einstein’s gravitational waves. The breakthrough, possibly the biggest in physics in a century, could be the key to new understanding of the universe.
Recent rumors of the success in detecting gravitational waves, or as some scientists put it "very weak spacetime wiggles which propagate at the speed of light" were officially confirmed Thursday.
"Ladies and gentlemen! We have detected gravitational waves, we did it!," LIGO laboratory executive director David Reitze announced in Washington.
"These gravitational waves were produced by two colliding black holes, [that] came together, merged and formed a single black hole about 1.3 billion years ago," Reitze said.
These ripples in the fabric of spacetime are one of the most important variables in Einstein's theory of relativity and it took astronomers decades to detect them, although they were pretty sure that gravitational waves existed.
The discovery has been made with the use of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) - a system of two detectors constructed to spot tiny vibrations from passing gravitational waves. Funded by the National Science Foundation, LIGO's identical detectors are located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington.
The observatories, which are "the most precise measuring device ever built," recorded a signal on September 14, 2015, "nearly simultaneously," and the signal "had a very specific characteristic," the laboratories' director said.
"As time went forward, the frequency went up," he explained, adding that it took scientists months of careful checking and analysis to confirm that what had been discovered was exactly gravitational waves.
Each of the two black holes before merging had about 30 times the mass of the Sun, were 150 kilometers (93 miles) in diameter and accelerated to about half the speed of light. The detected collision also proved that the merging of binary black holes does exist in the universe.
"Let's say this: The first discovery of gravitational waves is a Nobel Prize-winning venture," said physicist Bruce Allen of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover, Germany.
But the prize will be most possibly given not to theorists, but those who are behind the mechanism that confirmed the existence of the waves, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Pavel Ivanov told RT.
