Feb. 11, this past Thursday, marked a victory for scientists and Albert Einstein as scientists announced that Einstein's general theory of relativity has been supported by the detection of ripples in space, also known as gravitational waves.
"The discovery of gravitational waves is, I think, the most important breakthrough in modern science," Szabolcs Marka told CNN's Rachel Crane, an astronomy physics professor at Columbia University. He continued to comment that this finding could help gain more knowledge of our seemingly infinite universe.
Einstein claimed that time and distance are neither definite nor absolute. The laws of physics abides mutually with "non-accelerating observers, and that the speed of light in a vacuum was independent of the motion of all observers." This was the first part of the theory, the theory of special relativity and produced many new concepts with space and time. This expands to the theory of general relativity where acceleration is added into the picture. This, too, applies with space and time. This theory predicted black holes and gravitational waves.
This past Thursday, scientists announced that they have directly found gravitational waves for the very first time. A recording is heard of the collision of two black holes colliding, a literal "cosmic clash of black holes so violent that its shock waves rippled the ethereal fabric of space and time across a billion light years of distance."
Most minds can't wrap around it. But it's an opening to new potential discoveries of the universe that has not been uncovered before.
“It is one of the most spectacular verifications of Einstein’s theory,” Columbia University astrophysicist Zoltan Haiman told the Wall Street Journal. “This is like a new window into the universe.”
LIGO, The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observator, members are the ones who broke the announcement after discovery.
LIGO wrote in an announcement:
Gravitational waves carry information about their dramatic origins and about the nature of gravity that cannot otherwise be obtained. 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. This collision of two black holes had been predicted but never observed.
The gravitational waves were detected on September 14, 2015 at 5:51 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (9:51 a.m. UTC) by both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, USA. The LIGO Observatories are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and were conceived, built, and are operated by Caltech and MIT.
This year marks the 100 year anniversary of Einstein's theory. After decades of searching for gravitational waves, there are a new array of things to explore.
"A physicist is always looking for a flaw in a theory. And the only way to find a flaw is to test it," Marka told CNN. "Einstein's theory did not present any flaws to us yet, and that is really scary. Physicists are very (skeptical) of flawless theories because then we have nothing to do."
