Thursday, February 11, 2016

Scientists detect gravitational waves, hypothesised a century ago by Einstein

Gravitational waves are small ripples in space-time that are believed to travel across the universe at the speed of light.

JACOB KOSHY- February 11, 2016

After four months of analysis, a consortium of scientists— including from India — confirmed Thursday that they had detected a signal from space from 1.3 billion years ago. The signal, which travelled as a gravitational wave was from the fusion of two black holes into a single one — the first time ever that such a phenomenon was observed — and registered as a “çhirp’’ at two highly sensitive detectors, called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) located in Washington and Louisiana.

Scientists say that this detection is as momentous as Galileo, 400 years ago. first using the telescope and getting a glimpse of what several celestial objects looked like magnified. “This is the first time that the universe has spoken to us in the language of gravitational waves,” said David Reitze, Executive Director of the LIGO Project. The discovery is proof that researchers, through gravitational waves, can now observe a new class of astronomical phenomena just as observing x-ray signals from space brought alive pulsar, neutron stars and a host of other unprecedented celestial objects.

Though the detectors were American, Indian scientists have contributed significantly in terms of designing algorithms that were used to analyse the signals registered by the detector and be sure that it was indeed from a gravitational wave. Indians have also made, three decades ago, theoretical contributions to understand how such black holes may collide into each other.

“It is an extremely significant find and Nobel worthy,”” said Bala Iyer, a theoretical physicist and among the leaders of the Indian consortium that contributed to the find. Immediately after the confirmation of the waves were formally announced, Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted his congratulations and announced approval for a project to have a gravitational-wave detector in India, a project that has been on the anvil for several years.