In 1900, the British physicist Lord Kelvin is said to have pronounced: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” Within three decades, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of relativity had revolutionized the field. Today, no physicist would dare assert that our physical knowledge of the universe is near completion. To the contrary, each new discovery seems to unlock a Pandora’s box of even bigger, even deeper physics questions. These are our picks for the most profound open questions of all.
The LIGO experiment has confirmed Albert Einstein’s prediction of ripples in space time and promises to open a new era of astrophysics .
This discovery is not new, a scientific arc of wonder that began 200 years ago, when a British scientist Michael Faraday began to puzzle about how action was transmitted across the distance of s The scientists detected their cataclysmic event using an instrument so sensitive it could detect a change in the distance between the solar system and the nearest star four light years away to the thickness of a human hair.
About 1.3 billion years ago two black holes swirled closer and closer together until they crashed in a furious bang. Each black hole packed roughly 30 times the mass of our sun into a minute volume, and their head-on impact came as the two were approaching the speed of light.
The staggering strength of the merger gave rise to a new black hole and created a gravitational field so strong that it distorted space time in waves that spread throughout space with a power about 50 times stronger than that of all the shining stars and galaxies in the observable universe. Such events are, incredibly, thought to be common in space, but this collision was the first of its kind ever detected and its waves the first ever seen.
Scientists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced on Thursday at a much-anticipated press conference in Washington, D.C. (one of at least five simultaneous events held in the U.S. and Europe) that the more than half-century the search for gravitational wave has finally succeeded.
There are people who’ve put their entire life into this search, and there are people who died before having a chance to see anything.
Albert Einstein first predicted gravitational waves in 1916 based on his general theory of relativity, but even he waffled about whether or not they truly exist. Scientists began seeking these ripple in space time in the 1960s but none succeeded in measuring their effects on Earth until now.
LIGO discovery not only provides the first direct evidence for gravitational waves but also opens the door to using them to study the powerful cosmic events that create them. “It’s a huge deal for Theoretical Physics fan like myself.
More than 1,000 scientists work on the $1-billion LIGO experiment, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. The project uses two detectors, one located in Washington State and the other in Louisiana, to sense the distortions in space that occur when a gravitational wave passes through Earth. Each detector is shaped like a giant letter, with legs four kilometers long. Laser light bounces back and forth through the legs, reflecting off mirrors, and amazingly precise atomic clocks measure how long it takes to make the journey.
Normally, the two legs are exactly the same length, and so the light takes exactly the same amount of time to traverse each. If a gravitational wave passes through, however, the detector and the ground beneath it will expand and contract infinitesimally in one direction, and the two perpendicular legs will no longer be the same size. One of the lasers will arrive a fraction of a second later than the other.
LIGO must be unbelievably sensitive to measure this change in the length of the legs, which is smaller than one ten-thousandth the diameter of a proton, or less than the size of a soccer ball compared with the span of the Milky Way. “It’s one of the most complex systems ever built by mankind. There are so many knobs to turn, so many things to align, to achieve that [sensitivity].
In fact, the experiment is so delicate that unrelated events such as an airplane flying overhead, wind buffeting the building or tiny seismic shifts in the ground beneath the detector can disturb the lasers in ways that mimic gravitational signals.
If I clap in the control room, you will see a blip. The researchers carefully weed out such contaminating signals and also take advantage of the fact that the detectors in Washington and Louisiana are highly unlikely to be affected by the same contamination at the same time. By comparing the two detectors, they can be even more certain that what they are seeing is something that’s coming from outside the Earth.
My question is how about sun flairs! A meteorites on the moon or other stars? How about the effect of the infra sound from and out of earth, something that happened outside our earth it is difficult to prove that these blips come from the ripple of the black hall.
LIGO began its first run in 2002, and hunted through 2010 without finding any prove. The scientists then shut down the experiment and upgraded nearly every aspect of the detectors, including boosting the power of the lasers and replacing the mirrors, for a subsequent run, called Advanced LIGO, that began officially on September 18, 2015.
Yet even before then the experiment was up and running: the signal arrived on September 14 at 5:51 A.M. Eastern time, reaching the detector in Louisiana seven milliseconds before it got to the detector in Washington. Advanced LIGO is already about three times more sensitive than the initial LIGO, and is designed to become about 10 times more sensitive than the first iteration in the next few years.
Before now, the strongest evidence of gravitational waves came indirectly from observations of super dense, spinning neutron stars called pulsars. In 1974 Joseph Taylor, Jr., and Russell Hulse discovered a pulsar circling a neutron star, and later observations showed that the pulsar’s orbit was shrinking. Scientists concluded that the pulsar must be losing energy in the form of gravitational waves—a discovery that won Taylor and Hulse the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The discovery is not just proof of gravitational waves, but it give more prove for the existence of black hall.
LIGO ’s ability to study the characteristics of gravitational waves will allow scientists to study black holes in a whole new way. Researchers would like to know the details of how two black holes collide, and whether a new black hole arises as theory suggests.
The observatory should also be able to see gravitational waves created by other cataclysmic events, such as exploding supernovae and collisions of two neutron stars.
LIGO and future gravitational wave experiments will also allow physicists to put general relativity to the test. The 100-year-old theory has stood the test of time but it still conflicts with the theory of quantum mechanics that rules over the subatomic realm. one that is more complete.
Astronomers have already exploited visible light, the infrared and ultraviolet, radio waves, x-rays and even gamma-rays in their attempt to understand the mechanics of stars, the evolution of the galaxies and the expansion of the universe from an initial big bang 13.8bn years ago. Remember this number is wrong as we know now it is about 19 billion years exactly as the holy books predicted. Scientists might possibly make a lab in the space in near future with 3 or more stations that collect these waves and measure them and send a copy to earth visual and audio recorder away from the earth many variables that effect they collection of the sample.
The colliding black holes that produced these gravitational waves created a violent storm in the fabric of space and time, a storm in which time speed up and slowed down, and speed up again, a storm in which the shape of space was bent in this way and that way.
Thank you for reading.
Steve Ramsey, PhD. Calgary- Alberta. Canada.
Thank you for reading and sharing your thought , it is by sharing we gain more knowledge and understanding, Yes for sure one day we will have it, this multi million dollars projects only detect small amount of the GW the one that started 1,3 billion years ago so this detector properly missed allot of the unknown waves of course we can not detect the main bang the original wave , it is like coming to close to the sun .My IDEA IS THAT we detect this wave but yet we will have more sound waves to follow much later as sound waves are slower than light and magnetic waves.