After nearly a century, the hunt for an elusive cosmic quarry is over. With the help of lasers and mirrors, scientists have directly observed gravitational waves, or wrinkles in the fabric of spacetime itself.I suspect that Einstein would have been astonished that it proved possible to build an apparatus sensitive enough to detect them.
Two colliding black holes, one with 36 times the mass of the sun, and the other with 29, emitted those gravitational waves as they spiralled into one another and eventually collided.
From roughly 1.3 billion light-years away, these waves spread like ripples in the cosmic pond and washed over Earth on September 14, causing a minuscule but measurable change in the distance between four sets of mirrors—two in Louisiana, and two in Washington state.
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Friday, February 12, 2016
Gravitational Waves
Again, Einstein was right. Even when he wasn't sure he was.
4 comments:
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The Louisiana ficility is not far from my house. Less than a 30 minute trip. It's a cool place, and they have some really outgoing scientists that host a monthly "kids day" there. I'm sure a lot of crap goes on there that would be pretty boring to the average person, but they picked some great scientists to be their face for the public. My son loved going there for the kids day, and if I'm honest, I think I got almost as much a kick out if it as he did. They're doing some extremely cool stuff there.
ReplyDeleteThe thing that grabbed me was as I walked to class in 1986, I could see the first prototypes of the types of equipment they used to finally pin this down. That's over thirty years ago that an open roll-up door in a science building at LSU gave me a look at the start of something like this. It boggles the mind that a scientist might spend that period trying to tease out some data to finally prove something to confirm a theory. The amount of brainpower brought to bear on this over the last 100 years is incredible.
ReplyDeleteIt looked like two bathysphere's were mating, all steel, pipes and curves. Set in a roughly L-shaped configuration, it wasn't much more that 30' X 30' X 10'.
Next question : if gravity waves are quantised, how "big" are the quanta? Wanna name that quantum "YoMomma" ;-)
ReplyDelete"Gravitational", not "gravity" waves. Seems there is a difference.
ReplyDelete