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DISCOVER

Gravitational Waves

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Published in: Physics
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Physicists have confirmed the existence of Einstein's Gravitational Waves.

Anshuman P / Kolkata

3 years of teaching experience

Qualification: M.Tech (INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, KHARAGPUR - 2011), B.Tech/B.E. (NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, DURGAPUR - 2009), M.Tech (INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, MADRAS - 2012)

Teaches: Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics, AIEEE, IIT JEE Advanced, IIT JEE Mains

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  1. Gravitational waves Physicists have confirmed the existence of Einstein's gravitational waves, marking one of the biggest astrophysical discoveries of the past century. It's a huge deal, because it not only improves our understanding of how the Universe works, it also opens up a whole new way of studying it. The gravitational wave signal was detected by physicists at LIGO on September 14 last year, and the historic announcement was made at a press conference this morning. Gravitational waves are so exciting because they were the last major prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity that had to be confirmed, and discovering them will help us understand how the Universe is shaped by mass. "Gravitational waves are akin to sound waves that traveled through space at the speed of light, from the University of Western Australia. "Up to now humanity has been deaf to the universe. Suddenly we know how to listen. The Universe has spoken and we have understood." What does that mean for us? Just think of all the breakthroughs that have come thanks to the discovery of x-rays and radio waves - now that we can detect gravitational waves, we're going to have a whole new way to see and study the Universe. But let's step back for a second here and explain what gravitational waves actually are. According to Einstein's theory, the fabric of space-time can become curved by anything massive in the Universe. When cataclysmic events happen, such as black holes merging or stars exploding, these curves can ripple out elsewhere as gravitational waves, just like if someone had dropped a stone in a pond. By the time those ripples get to us on Earth, they're tiny (around a billionth of the diameter of an atom), which is why scientists have struggled for so many years to find them. But thanks to LIGO - the laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatory - we've finally been able to detect them. The LIGO laboratory works by bouncing lasers back and forth in two 4-km-long pipes, allowing physicists to measure incredibly small changes in space-time. One 14 September 201 5, they picked up a relatively big change in their Livingston lab in Louisiana, what you'd call a blip in the system. Then, 7 milliseconds later, they detected the
  2. same blip with their lab in Hanford, Washington, 4,000 km away, suggesting that it had been caused by a gravitational wave passing through Earth. In the months since, researchers have been rigorously studying this signal to see if it could have been caused by anything else. But the overwhelming conclusion is that the blip was caused by gravitational waves - the discovery has statistical significant of 5.1 sigma, which means there's only a 1 in 6 million chance that the result is a fluke. In fact, the signal almost perfectly matches up with what scientists predicted gravitational waves would look like, based on Einstein's theory. So where did this gravitational wave come from? The physicists were able to trace the signal back to the merging of two black holes around 1.3 billion years ago. This event - which in itself is a big deal, seeing as no one had ever spotted a binary black hole merger before - was so massive that it significantly warped the fabric of space time, creating ripples that spread out across the Universe... finally reaching us last year. "The discovery of this gravitational wave suggests that merging black holes are heavier and more numerous than many researchers previously believed," said LIGO, from Monash University in Australia. "This bodes well for detection of large populations of distant black holes ... It will be intriguing to see what other sources of gravitational waves are out there, waiting to be discovered." But this is just the beginning of what gravitational waves can teach us - several other gravitational wave observatories and detectors are scheduled to come online in the next five years, and they'll allow us to more sensitively detect gravitational radiation. Just like we can currently listen to radio waves in order to find out what happened in the history of our Universe, we now have the ability to do the same with gravitational waves. And what's most exciting is that we can't even begin to predict right now what that could lead to.

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