The universe is still full of mystery! The history of general relativity as a science is actually rather dismal. These elusive ripples in the fabric of space – time were first predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago. The galaxy formed in the very early universe in a way astronomers have never seen or understood. Dark matter has strange characteristics and behaves quite differently from ordinary matter.
The team had collected data for a measurement that they had not even expected to be able to make. Scientists only know dark matter exists because they can observe how it pushes and pulls things they can see, like stars. Understanding dark matter is just one way gravitational waves might usher in a new era of cosmology.
Most of all our knowledge about the universe has come to us in the form of light, or electromagnetic radiation. Using electromagnetic waves we can not see further back than 400,000 years after the big bang. Advanced LIGO’s first observational run ended in January, and the experiment is currently undergoing more improvements.
What are gravitational waves and gravitational wave detectors, and how do they work? Gravitational waves for those who do not know are energy-carrying waves that propagate through a gravitational field.
Gravitational waves detection was all just noise, some researchers say. The results are published in Science: If standard model particle created these anomalies, they should have been neutrinos. Scientists have already proved that. The smallest of all elementary particles, neutrinos are pretty much everywhere.
Gravitational waves were observed on 14 September 2015, at 5:51am ET by both of the LIGO detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana and Hanford, Washington.
The stunning announcement that scientists using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory ( LIGO ) had found what they had long been looking for shook the scientific community.
A supermassive black hole collision that took place 1.3 billion years ago. The discovery has been accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters. In fact, LIGO saw gravitational waves almost immediately.
Dark matter’s existence is inferred from the motion of objects affected by its gravitational pull. Last year’s surprising capture of gravitational waves radiating from a neutron star collision offered a third way to calculate the Hubble constant. The surprising thing is that even though scientists doing each calculation are confident about their results, they don’t match.
Rumors are rippling through the science world that physicists may have detected gravitational waves, a key element of Einstein’s theory which if confirmed would be one of the biggest discoveries of our time. Theoretical physicists speculate that our universe may not be the only one.
While dark matter can be inferred from its gravitational effects, physicists have great difficulty identifying it, as it otherwise hardly interacts with “regular” matter.
Image Credits: Caltech. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has discovered ripples in space-time created by merging black holes.
