I googled "gravitational waves, Einstein breakthrough" and here's first of many items, this from the New York Times:~~
LIGO Hears Gravitational Waves Einstein Predicted
About a hundred years ago, Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, but until now, they were undetectable.
By DENNIS OVERBYE, JONATHAN CORUM and JASON
DRAKEFORD on
Publish Date February 11, 2016.
Photo by Artist's rendering/Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes.
Watch in Times Video »
A
team of scientists announced on Thursday that they had heard and
recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years
away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
That
faint rising tone, physicists say, is the first direct evidence of
gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that
Einstein predicted a century ago. (Listen to it here.)
It completes his vision of a universe in which space and time are
interwoven and dynamic, able to stretch, shrink and jiggle. And it is a
ringing confirmation of the nature of black holes, the bottomless
gravitational pits from which not even light can escape, which were the
most foreboding (and unwelcome) part of his theory.
More
generally, it means that a century of innovation, testing, questioning
and plain hard work after Einstein imagined it on paper, scientists have
finally tapped into the deepest register of physical reality, where the
weirdest and wildest implications of Einstein’s universe become
manifest.
Conveyed
by these gravitational waves, power 50 times greater than the output of
all the stars in the universe combined vibrated a pair of L-shaped
antennas in Washington State and Louisiana known as LIGO on Sept. 14.
If
replicated by future experiments, that simple chirp, which rose to the
note of middle C before abruptly stopping, seems destined to take its
place among the great sound bites of science, ranking with Alexander Graham Bell’s “Mr. Watson — come here” and Sputnik’s first beeps from orbit.
“We
are all over the moon and back,” said Gabriela González of Louisiana
State University, a spokeswoman for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration,
short for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. “Einstein
would be very happy, I think.”
Members
of the LIGO group, a worldwide team of scientists, along with
scientists from a European team known as the Virgo Collaboration,
published a report in Physical Review Letters on Thursday with more than 1,000 authors.
“I
think this will be one of the major breakthroughs in physics for a long
time,” said Szabolcs Marka, a Columbia University professor who is one
of the LIGO scientists.
“Everything
else in astronomy is like the eye,” he said, referring to the panoply
of telescopes that have given stargazers access to more and more of the
electromagnetic spectrum and the ability to peer deeper and deeper into
space and time. “Finally, astronomy grew ears. We never had ears
before.”
Long-Awaited Triumph
The
discovery is a great triumph for three physicists — Kip Thorne of the
California Institute of Technology, Rainer Weiss of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and Ronald Drever, formerly of Caltech and now
retired in Scotland — who bet their careers on the dream of measuring
the most ineffable of Einstein’s notions.
“Until
now, we scientists have only seen warped space-time when it’s calm,”
Dr. Thorne said in an email. “It’s as though we had only seen the
ocean’s surface on a calm day but had never seen it roiled in a storm,
with crashing waves.”
The
black holes that LIGO observed created a storm “in which the flow of
time speeded, then slowed, then speeded,” he said. “A storm with space
bending this way, then that.”
The chirp is also sweet vindication for the National Science Foundation,
which spent about $1.1 billion over more than 40 years to build a new
hotline to nature, facing down criticism that sources of gravitational
waves were not plentiful or loud enough to justify the cost.
“It’s
been decades, through a lot of different technological innovations,”
France Córdova, the foundation’s director, said in an interview,
recalling how, in the early years, the foundation’s advisory board had
“really scratched their heads on this one.”
Word
of LIGO’s success was met by hosannas in the scientific community,
albeit with the requisite admonishments of the need for confirmation or
replication.
“I
was freaking out,” said Janna Levin, a theorist at Barnard College at
Columbia who was not part of LIGO but was granted an early look at the
results for her warts-and-all book about the project, “Black Hole
Blues,” to be published this spring.
Robert Garisto, the editor of Physical Review Letters, said he had gotten goose bumps while reading the LIGO paper.
Elusive Disturbances
When
Einstein announced his theory in 1915, he rewrote the rules for space
and time that had prevailed for more than 200 years, since the time of
Newton, stipulating a static and fixed framework for the universe.
Instead, Einstein said, matter and energy distort the geometry of the
universe in the way a heavy sleeper causes a mattress to sag, producing
the effect we call gravity.
A
disturbance in the cosmos could cause space-time to stretch, collapse
and even jiggle, like a mattress shaking when that sleeper rolls over,
producing ripples of gravity: gravitational waves.
Einstein
was not quite sure about these waves. In 1916, he told Karl
Schwarzschild, the discoverer of black holes, that gravitational waves
did not exist, then said they did. In 1936, he and his assistant Nathan
Rosen set out to publish a paper debunking the idea before doing the
same flip-flop again.
According
to the equations physicists have settled on, gravitational waves would
compress space in one direction and stretch it in another as they
traveled outward.
In 1969, Joseph Weber,
a physicist at the University of Maryland, claimed to have detected
gravitational waves using a six-foot-long aluminum cylinder as an
antenna. Waves of the right frequency would make the cylinder ring like a
tuning fork, he said.
Others
could not duplicate his result, but few doubted that gravitational
waves were real. Dr. Weber’s experiment inspired a generation of
scientists to look harder for Einsteinian marks on the universe.
In
1978, the radio astronomers Joseph H. Taylor Jr. and Russell A. Hulse,
then at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, discovered a pair of
neutron stars, superdense remnants of dead stars, orbiting each other.
One of them was a pulsar, emitting a periodic beam of electromagnetic
radiation. By timing its pulses, the astronomers determined that the
stars were losing energy and falling closer together at precisely the
rate that would be expected if they were radiating gravitational waves.
Scientists on Detecting Gravitational Waves
Scientists announced that they had
finally detected gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of
space-time that Albert Einstein predicted a century ago.
By REUTERS on Publish Date February 11, 2016.
Photo by Andrew Harnik/Associated Press.
Watch in Times Video »
Dr. Hulse and Dr. Taylor won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1993.
Another group of astronomers who go by the name Bicep made headlines in 2014
when they claimed to have detected gravitational waves from the
beginning of the Big Bang, using a telescope at the South Pole. They
later acknowledged that their observations had probably been contaminated by interstellar stardust.
A Quixotic Project
Dr.
Thorne of Caltech and Dr. Weiss of M.I.T. first met in 1975, Dr. Weiss
said, when they had to share a hotel room during a meeting in
Washington. Dr. Thorne was already a renowned black-hole theorist, but
he was looking for new experimental territory to conquer. They stayed up
all night talking about how to test general relativity and debating how
best to search for gravitational waves.
Dr.
Thorne then recruited Dr. Drever, a gifted experimentalist from the
University of Glasgow, to start a gravitational wave program at Caltech.
Dr. Drever wanted to use light — laser beams bouncing between precisely
positioned mirrors — to detect the squeeze and stretch of a passing
wave.
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Dr.
Weiss tried to mount a similar effort at M.I.T., also using the laser
approach, but at the time, black holes were not in fashion there.
(Things are better now, he said.)
The
technological odds were against both efforts. The researchers
calculated that a typical gravitational wave from out in space would
change the distance between a pair of mirrors by an almost imperceptible
amount: one part in a billion trillion. Dr. Weiss recalled that when he
explained the experiment to his potential funders at the National
Science Foundation, “everybody thought we were out of our minds.”
In
1984, to the annoyance of Dr. Drever and the relief of Dr. Weiss, the
National Science Foundation ordered the two teams to merge. Dr. Thorne
found himself in the dual roles of evangelist for the field of
gravitational waves and broker for experimental disagreements.
Progress was slow until the three physicists were replaced in 1987 by a single director as part of the price of going forward.
The
first version of the experiment, known as Initial LIGO, started in 2000
and ran for 10 years, mostly to show that it could work on the scale
needed. There are two detectors: one in Hanford, Wash., the other in
Livingston, La. Hunters once shot up the outside of one of the antenna
arms in Louisiana, and a truck crashed into one of the arms in Hanford.
In neither case was the experiment damaged.
Over
the last five years, the entire system was rebuilt to increase its
sensitivity to the point where the team could realistically expect to
hear something.
LIGO’s
antennas are L-shaped, with perpendicular arms 2.5 miles long. Inside
each arm, cocooned in layers of steel and concrete, runs the world’s
largest bottle of nothing, a vacuum chamber a couple of feet wide
containing 2.5 million gallons of empty space. At the end of each arm
are mirrors hanging by glass threads, isolated from the bumps and
shrieks of the environment better than any Rolls-Royce ever conceived.
Thus
coddled, the lasers in the present incarnation, known as Advanced LIGO,
can detect changes in the length of one of those arms as small as one
ten-thousandth the diameter of a proton — a subatomic particle too small
to be seen by even the most powerful microscopes — as a gravitational
wave sweeps through.
UPDATED @15.38PM Because I love my ER to be well-informed, from the MSM Star reporting using Foreign Agencies' reporting:
UPDATED @15.38PM Because I love my ER to be well-informed, from the MSM Star reporting using Foreign Agencies' reporting:
World
Friday, 12 February 2016 | MYT 5:38 AM
Ripple effect - scientists await word on gravitational waves
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WASHINGTON/CAMBRIDGE,
Mass. (Reuters) - Scientists for the first time have detected
gravitational waves, ripples in space and time hypothesised by Albert
Einstein a century ago, in a landmark discovery announced on Thursday
that opens a new window for studying the cosmos.
The researchers said they identified gravitational waves coming from two distant black holes - extraordinarily dense objects whose existence also was foreseen by Einstein - that orbited one another, spiralled inward and smashed together at high speed to form a single, larger black hole.
The waves were unleashed by the collision of the black holes, one of them 29 times the mass of the sun and the other 36 times the solar mass, located 1.3 billion light years from Earth, the researchers said.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves. We did it," said California Institute of Technology physicist David Reitze, triggering applause at a packed news conference in Washington.
"It's been a very long road, but this is just the beginning,"
Louisiana State University physicist Gabriela Gonzalez told the news
conference, hailing the discovery as opening a new era in astronomy.
The scientific milestone was achieved using a pair of giant laser detectors in the United States, located in Louisiana and Washington state, capping a decades-long quest to find these waves.
"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 speeded up, and slowed down, and speeded up again, a storm in which the shape of space was bent in this way and that way," Caltech physicist Kip Thorne said.
The scientists first detected the waves last Sept. 14.
The two instruments, working in unison, are called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). They detected remarkably small vibrations from the gravitational waves as they passed through the Earth. The scientists converted the wave signal into audio waves and listened to the sounds of the black holes merging.
At the news conference, they played an audio recording of this: a low rumbling pierced by chirps.
"We're actually hearing them go thump in the night," Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Matthew Evans said. "There's a very visceral connection to this observation."
'A NEW SENSE'
"We are really witnessing the opening of a new tool for doing astronomy," MIT astrophysicist Nergis Mavalvala said in an interview. "We have turned on a new sense. We have been able to see and now we will be able to hear as well."
While opening a door to new ways to observe the universe, scientists said gravitational waves should help them gain knowledge about enigmatic objects like black holes and neutron stars. The waves also may provide insight into the mysterious nature of the very early universe.
The scientists said that because gravitational waves are so radically different from electromagnetic waves they expect them to reveal big surprises about the universe.
Everything we knew until now about the cosmos stemmed from electromagnetic waves such as radio waves, visible light, infrared light, X-rays and gamma rays. Because such waves encounter interference as they travel across the universe, they can tell only part of the story.
Gravitational waves experience no such barriers, meaning they offer a wealth of additional information. Black holes, for example, do not emit light, radio waves and the like, but can be studied via gravitational waves.
Einstein in 1916 proposed the existence of gravitational waves as an outgrowth of his ground-breaking general theory of relativity, which depicted gravity as a distortion of space and time triggered by the presence of matter. Until now scientists had found only indirect evidence of their existence, beginning in the 1970s.
Scientists sounded positively giddy over the discovery.
"This is the holy grail of science," said Rochester Institute of Technology astrophysicist Carlos Lousto.
"The last time anything like this happened was in 1888 when Heinrich Hertz detected the radio waves that had been predicted by James Clerk Maxwell’s field-equations of electromagnetism in 1865," added Durham University physicist Tom McLeish.
Abhay Ashtekar, director of Penn State University's Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, said heavy celestial objects bend space and time but because of the relative weakness of the gravitational force the effect is miniscule except from massive and dense bodies like black holes and neutron stars.
A black hole is a region of space so packed with matter that not even photons of light can escape the force of gravity. Neutron stars are small, about the size of a city, but are extremely heavy, the compact remains of a larger star that died in a supernova explosion.
The National Science Foundation, an independent agency of the U.S. government, provided about $1.1 billion in funding for the research over 40 years.
(Reporting by Will Dunham in Washington, Irene Klotz in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and Scott Malone in Cambridge, Mass.; Editing by Tom Brown)
PS: FRom google.com cometh THAT PIC that tells a 10,000-words essay depicting that Einstein had a SENse of funD&HUmour&Rumour?
To COme in goODtime:~~~~
I wouldn't mind getting hold of the oRIgiNAL that carried his SIGNAture, who has godtten it before Desi thought of IT!?
DEar ESteemed REaders, read my NEW post of 19 FEb 2016 too, YL< DEsi 8.08AM FEb 19.
The researchers said they identified gravitational waves coming from two distant black holes - extraordinarily dense objects whose existence also was foreseen by Einstein - that orbited one another, spiralled inward and smashed together at high speed to form a single, larger black hole.
The waves were unleashed by the collision of the black holes, one of them 29 times the mass of the sun and the other 36 times the solar mass, located 1.3 billion light years from Earth, the researchers said.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves. We did it," said California Institute of Technology physicist David Reitze, triggering applause at a packed news conference in Washington.
The scientific milestone was achieved using a pair of giant laser detectors in the United States, located in Louisiana and Washington state, capping a decades-long quest to find these waves.
"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 speeded up, and slowed down, and speeded up again, a storm in which the shape of space was bent in this way and that way," Caltech physicist Kip Thorne said.
The scientists first detected the waves last Sept. 14.
The two instruments, working in unison, are called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). They detected remarkably small vibrations from the gravitational waves as they passed through the Earth. The scientists converted the wave signal into audio waves and listened to the sounds of the black holes merging.
At the news conference, they played an audio recording of this: a low rumbling pierced by chirps.
"We're actually hearing them go thump in the night," Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Matthew Evans said. "There's a very visceral connection to this observation."
'A NEW SENSE'
"We are really witnessing the opening of a new tool for doing astronomy," MIT astrophysicist Nergis Mavalvala said in an interview. "We have turned on a new sense. We have been able to see and now we will be able to hear as well."
While opening a door to new ways to observe the universe, scientists said gravitational waves should help them gain knowledge about enigmatic objects like black holes and neutron stars. The waves also may provide insight into the mysterious nature of the very early universe.
The scientists said that because gravitational waves are so radically different from electromagnetic waves they expect them to reveal big surprises about the universe.
Everything we knew until now about the cosmos stemmed from electromagnetic waves such as radio waves, visible light, infrared light, X-rays and gamma rays. Because such waves encounter interference as they travel across the universe, they can tell only part of the story.
Gravitational waves experience no such barriers, meaning they offer a wealth of additional information. Black holes, for example, do not emit light, radio waves and the like, but can be studied via gravitational waves.
Einstein in 1916 proposed the existence of gravitational waves as an outgrowth of his ground-breaking general theory of relativity, which depicted gravity as a distortion of space and time triggered by the presence of matter. Until now scientists had found only indirect evidence of their existence, beginning in the 1970s.
Scientists sounded positively giddy over the discovery.
"This is the holy grail of science," said Rochester Institute of Technology astrophysicist Carlos Lousto.
"The last time anything like this happened was in 1888 when Heinrich Hertz detected the radio waves that had been predicted by James Clerk Maxwell’s field-equations of electromagnetism in 1865," added Durham University physicist Tom McLeish.
Abhay Ashtekar, director of Penn State University's Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, said heavy celestial objects bend space and time but because of the relative weakness of the gravitational force the effect is miniscule except from massive and dense bodies like black holes and neutron stars.
A black hole is a region of space so packed with matter that not even photons of light can escape the force of gravity. Neutron stars are small, about the size of a city, but are extremely heavy, the compact remains of a larger star that died in a supernova explosion.
The National Science Foundation, an independent agency of the U.S. government, provided about $1.1 billion in funding for the research over 40 years.
(Reporting by Will Dunham in Washington, Irene Klotz in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and Scott Malone in Cambridge, Mass.; Editing by Tom Brown)
PS: FRom google.com cometh THAT PIC that tells a 10,000-words essay depicting that Einstein had a SENse of funD&HUmour&Rumour?
To COme in goODtime:~~~~
I wouldn't mind getting hold of the oRIgiNAL that carried his SIGNAture, who has godtten it before Desi thought of IT!?
DEar ESteemed REaders, read my NEW post of 19 FEb 2016 too, YL< DEsi 8.08AM FEb 19.
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