So here is one of the biggest astrophysical discoveries of the past century.
In 1916, the year after the discovery of field equations of general relativity, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves which was not proved experimentally todate. According to Einstein's theory, the fabric of space-time can become curved by anything massive in the Universe. When any cataclysmic event 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.
Here is the first ever direct detection of gravitational waves and observation of a binary black hole system merging to form a single black hole. This observations provide unique access to the properties of space-time in the strong-field, high-velocity regime and confirm predictions of general relativity for the nonlinear dynamics of highly disturbed black holes.
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. Here the signal was observed with a matched-filter signal-to-noise ratio of 24 and a false alarm rate estimated to be less than 1 event per 203 000 years.
Results are published in PRL:
http://journals.aps.org/…/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102
In 1916, the year after the discovery of field equations of general relativity, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves which was not proved experimentally todate. According to Einstein's theory, the fabric of space-time can become curved by anything massive in the Universe. When any cataclysmic event 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.
Here is the first ever direct detection of gravitational waves and observation of a binary black hole system merging to form a single black hole. This observations provide unique access to the properties of space-time in the strong-field, high-velocity regime and confirm predictions of general relativity for the nonlinear dynamics of highly disturbed black holes.
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. Here the signal was observed with a matched-filter signal-to-noise ratio of 24 and a false alarm rate estimated to be less than 1 event per 203 000 years.
Results are published in PRL:
http://journals.aps.org/…/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102
