The discovery was in Washington published by researchers at the California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.
the gravity waves found with LIGO, the Laser Interferometer gravitational-wave Observatory, which had recently been updated.
the discovery opens new possibilities to look at the universe and is one of the most important discoveries of recent decades.
merged black holes
the now detected gravitational wave GW150914 appears to be derived from two merging black holes that are located at a distance of approximately 1.5 billion years light of the earth. The black holes were 35 and 30 solar masses heavily before they coalesced into a new, rapidly rotating black hole of 62 solar masses. The other three solar masses via Einstein’s famous formula E = mc² converted into energy and emitted as gravitational waves.
This is the conclusion the team has been coordinated by Professor Gijs Nelemans, astronomer at Radboud University Nijmegen and the Institute Astronomy, KU Leuven. Nelemans and his team were involved in the perception and Nelemans coordinated also the interpretation of the event giving rise to the observed gravitational waves rise.
Violent events such as merging of two black holes have so far only predicted but never observed. “This is the beginning of a new era in astronomy! We get a whole new way of looking at the universe and study the most extreme objects,” said a highly enthusiastic Gijs Nelemans.
Albert Einstein concluded in 1916, building on his general theory of relativity, that such a thing should exist as gravitational waves. Yet it took another 100 years before the first evidence was provided by observation.
Technology was also a huge challenge. The detection of the gravitational waves is done with a laser-interferometer. Such an interferometer is composed of two arms of each several kilometers long, which are in an angle of 90 degrees. Upon the passage of a gravitational wave, the one arm will be a bit longer and the other shorter. This tiny difference (in the order of 10-18m) should be measured with a very high accuracy and enables us thus able to detect a gravitational wave
On September 14, 2015 at 22:. 51u CET it was time. Gravitational waves were detected by both Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, Livingston (Louisiana) and Hanford (Washington) in the United States.
The LIGO observatories funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), they were designed and built and operated by Caltech and MIT.
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