Albert Einstein is pretty well known as the genius of the twentieth century, so it's not all that surprising that a lot of his theories and works ended up being some of the most pivotal in recent history. He proved that light doesn't just move in waves or in particles, but both; he theorized about wormholes; and of course he gave us the famous equation, E=mc^2.
What is mildly surprising is that it took until last week for some of his theories to be proven correct. Thanks to advances in technology, a team of scientists observed phenomena that proves the last prediction of Einstein's theory or general relativity.
Two black holes were observed as having collided on Thursday, Feb. 11, by physicists on 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. The collision of these dying stars created ripples in the fabric of space-time called gravitational waves -- a phenomenon Einstein predicted almost a century ago.
These gravitational waves carry information about their dramatic origins and about the nature of gravity that otherwise cannot be obtained. Physicists working on the team have concluded that the detected gravitational waves were produced during the last fraction of a second of the collision of two black holes which produced a single, more massive, spinning black hole. This kind collision has never been observed before, but has been predicted in the past.
To be fair, Einstein's theory of general relativity is one of his more controversial theories. The theory, which is the theory that led him to develop his famous equation, claims that space and time are not absolute things. In fact, it describes the space-time continuum as a kind of "sagging mattress where matter and energy, like a heavy sleeper, distort the geometry of the cosmos to produce the effect we call gravity, obliging light beams as well as marbles and falling apples to follow curved paths through space." For the layman, this means that space and time aren't everything we think that they are -- gravity and time are not things that we interact with, but independent things that are beyond our control.
The observation is the result of years of dedicated work of physicists to prove Einstein correct, but more than that, it opens a whole new world of possible discovery for scientists in space. This is the first recorded evidence that black holes do indeed exist, and that they can merge -- which opens an incredible amount of room for discovery in the future.
