Gravitational Waves

A "revolutionary" new era in science just getting started with a violent event in deep space.

Today announced that researchers have detected ripples in the fabric of space called gravitational waves. It is a revolutionary breakthrough that has eluded the brightest and most sensitive minds machines Earth for decades.

Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves 100 years ago, but thought it too weak to detect, as it rippled through the universe.

Einstein was wrong.

The news was announced on February 11 by members of the Observatory Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave (LIGO), 15 nations, 900-scientist, $ 1 billion experiment that sought signs of the phenomenon since 2002.

"Finally, these waves have been detected on Earth with an incredibly sensitive experiment. And, surprisingly, the source of the waves is a system of two black holes in orbit around each other, that spiral inward and collide," Cornell professor of physics and astrophysics Saul Teukolsky confirmed in a statement emailed to inside information Tech.

The researchers detected waves were created by two black holes collide and merge to form a single black hole 1.3 million years ago. When two black holes merged, they released three suns energy.

Physical Szabi Marka, a collaborator LIGO based at the University of Columbia, said Tech insiders before the announcement that detect waves "would revolutionize physics" and draw "the last undiscovered territory of Einstein."

And a collision of two black holes is a catastrophic event that could only dream of observation so far.

"Having gravitational waves as a tool will allow us to study black holes and black holes are the key to many future puzzle science," said Marka. "Actually we do not know what happens around a black hole. We do not know what happens when a black hole is another black hole. We do not know what happens when a black hole eats something."

There are many other uses of gravitational waves, now all squarely in the realm of possibility, and Marka said the next research was barreling toward us will be "spectacular."

"We will open new doors that will never be closed again," he said.

The discovery not only claims the wildest prediction of Einstein and gives astronomers a powerful new tool to probe the cosmos - from inside exploding stars to the surfaces of black holes - but also supports an idea $ 1 billion and it tells us we are on the right track to understanding how the universe works.