![]() (Science and Technology Facilities Council, STFC) and Australia (Australian Research Council) also have made significant commitments to the project. ![]() Funding organizations in Germany (Max Planck Society), the U.K. The US National Science Foundation leads in financial support for Advanced LIGO. The discovery was made possible by the enhanced capabilities of Advanced LIGO, a major upgrade that increases the sensitivity of the instruments compared to the first generation LIGO detectors, enabling a large increase in the volume of the universe probed-and the discovery of gravitational waves during its first observation run. Reitze, executive director of the LIGO Laboratory. “Our observation of gravitational waves accomplishes an ambitious goal set out over 5 decades ago to directly detect this elusive phenomenon and better understand the universe, and, fittingly, fulfills Einstein’s legacy on the 100th anniversary of his general theory of relativity,” says Caltech’s David H. The new LIGO discovery is the first observation of gravitational waves themselves, made by measuring the tiny disturbances the waves make to space and time as they pass through the earth. For discovering the pulsar and showing that it would make possible this particular gravitational wave measurement, Hulse and Taylor were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1993. Weisberg in 1982 found that the orbit of the pulsar was slowly shrinking over time because of the release of energy in the form of gravitational waves. Taylor and Russell Hulse discovered in 1974 a binary system composed of a pulsar in orbit around a neutron star. The existence of gravitational waves was first demonstrated in the 1970s and 80s by Joseph Taylor, Jr., and colleagues. It is these gravitational waves that LIGO has observed. This energy is emitted as a final strong burst of gravitational waves. During the final fraction of a second, the two black holes collide into each other at nearly one-half the speed of light and form a single more massive black hole, converting a portion of the combined black holes’ mass to energy, according to Einstein’s formula E=mc 2. By looking at the time of arrival of the signals-the detector in Livingston recorded the event 7 milliseconds before the detector in Hanford-scientists can say that the source was located in the Southern Hemisphere.Īccording to general relativity, a pair of black holes orbiting around each other lose energy through the emission of gravitational waves, causing them to gradually approach each other over billions of years, and then much more quickly in the final minutes. About 3 times the mass of the sun was converted into gravitational waves in a fraction of a second-with a peak power output about 50 times that of the whole visible universe. The discovery, accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters, was made by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (which includes the GEO Collaboration and the Australian Consortium for Interferometric Gravitational Astronomy) and the Virgo Collaboration using data from the two LIGO detectors.īased on the observed signals, LIGO scientists estimate that the black holes for this event were about 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun, and the event took place 1.3 billion years ago. The LIGO Observatories are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and were conceived, built, and are operated by Caltech and MIT. Eastern Daylight Time (09:51 UTC) by both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, USA. The gravitational waves were detected on Septemat 5:51 a.m. This collision of two black holes had been predicted but never observed. ![]() ![]() Physicists have concluded that the detected gravitational waves were produced during the final fraction of a second of the merger of two black holes to produce a single, more massive spinning black hole. ![]() Gravitational waves carry information about their dramatic origins and about the nature of gravity that cannot otherwise be obtained. This confirms a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity and opens an unprecedented new window onto the cosmos. LIGO Opens New Window on the Universe with Observation of Gravitational Waves from Colliding Black Holesįor the first time, scientists have observed ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves, arriving at the earth from a cataclysmic event in the distant universe. ![]()
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