![]() ![]() So scientists (known as physicists) put together the things that they know, and then make excellent guesses. For instance, things in the universe are so far away, they’re hard to see or measure. Often, theories are made because there is no way scientists can prove certain things. One of the most famous was Albert Einstein.īefore he died (back in 1955), he came up with many “theories” - really good guesses - about what happens in the universe. To learn how LIGO achieves this seemingly impossible task, visit LIGO's Interferometer.There are many people who study the universe, and try to understand it. In fact, by the time gravitational waves from LIGO's first detection reached us, the amount of space-time wobbling they generated was a 1000 times smaller than the nucleus of an atom! LIGO was designed to make such inconceivable, exquisitely small measurements. While the processes that generate gravitational waves are extremely violent and destructive, by the time the waves reach Earth they are thousands of billions of times smaller, diminishing over time and space just as the waves from a pebble dropped in a pond get smaller and smaller as they move away from the source. LIGO's first detection will go down in history as one of humanity's greatest scientific achievements. But these confirmations had always come indirectly or mathematically and not through direct contact or interaction with an instrument.Īll of this changed on Septemwhen LIGO physically sensed the undulations in spacetime caused by gravitational waves generated by two colliding black holes 1.3 billion light-years away. Since then, many astronomers have studied pulsar radio-emissions (pulsars are neutron stars that emit beams of radio waves) and found similar effects, further confirming the existence of gravitational waves. In 1993, Hulse and Taylor would receive the Nobel Prize in Physics " for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation".Īrtist's Impression of a Binary Pulsar. After just four years, they first reported seeing a change in the period that verified that the stars were getting closer to each other at the rate predicted by general relativity (GR) if they were radiating gravitational waves (the rate predicted by GR agreed with the observed rate to within one half of one percent). Knowing that the system could be studied to test Einstein's prediction, Taylor and two colleagues (Joel Weisberg and Lee Fowler) began tracking the radio emissions from the stars to measure how their orbital period changed over time. This was exactly the type of system that general relativity predicted should radiate gravitational waves. In that year, two astronomers, Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor, using the Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico discovered a binary pulsar 21000 light years from Earth. Though Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916, the first proof of their existence didn't arrive until 1974, 20 years after his death. Your browser does not support this video tag. They are made visible here to illustrate their propagation away from the source. Note that gravitational waves themselves are invisible. The animation below illustrates how gravitational waves are emitted by two neutron stars as they orbit each other and then coalesce (credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center). Other gravitational waves are predicted to be caused by the rotation of neutron stars that are not perfect spheres, and possibly even the remnants of gravitational radiation created by the Big Bang. The strongest gravitational waves are produced by cataclysmic events such as colliding black holes, supernovae (massive stars exploding at the end of their lifetimes), and colliding neutron stars. These cosmic ripples would travel at the speed of light, carrying with them information about their origins, as well as clues to the nature of gravity itself. Einstein's mathematics showed that massive accelerating objects (things like neutron stars or black holes orbiting each other) would disrupt space-time in such a way that 'waves' of undulating space-time would propagate in all directions away from the source. Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916 in his general theory of relativity. Gravitational waves are 'ripples' in space-time caused by some of the most violent and energetic processes in the Universe. Two-dimensional illustration of how mass in the Universe distorts space-time. ![]()
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