![]() ![]() ![]() The detector was switched off in January for a further upgrade: astronomers still have to decipher months of material collected in the interval. The scientists detected their cataclysmic event using an instrument so sensitive it could detect a change in the distance between the solar system and the nearest star four light years away to the thickness of a human hair.Īnd they did so within weeks of turning on their new, upgraded instrument: it took just 20 milliseconds to catch the merger of two black holes, at a distance of 1.3 billion light years, somewhere beyond the Large Magellanic Cloud in the southern hemisphere sky, but it then took months of meticulous checking of the signal against all the complex computer simulations of black hole collision to make sure the evidence matched the theoretical template. “This observation is truly incredible science and marks three milestones for physics: the direct detection of gravitational waves, the first detection of a binary black hole, and the most convincing evidence to date that nature’s black holes are the objects predicted by Einstein’s theory.” So we have opened a new way of listening to a broadcasting channel which will allow us to discover phenomena we have never seen before,” he said. Gravitational waves carry completely different information about phenomena in the universe. But we can only see part of what happens in the universe. “We have observed the universe through light so far. “This is transformational,” said Prof Alberto Vecchio, of the University of Birmingham, and one of the researchers at Ligo. Why discovering gravitational waves changes everything Guardian ![]()
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