This delicate lily showed up in the side yard at the lake for the first time in five years.
Instead of making up a story to explain it I am just enjoying them.
"This is not just the detection of gravitational waves. What's really exciting is what comes next. Four hundred years ago, Galileo turned a telescope to the sky and opened the era of modern observational astronomy. I think we're doing something equally important here today. I think we're opening the window of gravitational astronomy."
Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime, created when two massive objects – such as black holes or neutron stars – hurtle around each other at extremely high speeds and collide. First put forward 100 years ago as a consequence of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, they have challenged theorists and experimentalists alike as one of the few elements of the theory that had not been experimentally proven. Until now.
LIGO, a system of two identical interferometers constructed to detect the tiny vibrations of passing gravitational waves, was conceived and built by MIT and Caltech researchers, funded by the US National Science Foundation.
The original LIGO experiment ran from 2002 to 2010 as a proof of concept. After significant upgrades to the detectors in Louisiana and Washington, Advanced LIGO did its first observation run in September 2015.
The first detection, at the Louisiana observatory, had a peak value of 10-21 metres. "For four kilometres [the length of the LIGO detector], that's a tiny, tiny fraction of a proton diameter. That's incredibly tiny," said González.
"We know it's real, because seven milliseconds later, we saw the same thing in the Hanford detector. This is it. This is how we know we have gravitational waves."
The signals exactly match what Einsteinian gravitation predicts for the merger of two black holes. The signals also indicate the wave carried three solar masses of energy. The signal is so strong, the researchers reported in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, that it exceeds the "five sigma" standard of statistical significance physicists use to claim a discovery.
"The LIGO measurement is a spectacular confirmation of not just one, but two of the key predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity: the existence of gravitational waves and black holes," Turok said. "Einstein developed his theory based on clues from experiment and prior theories, but even more on a remarkable intuition that gravitation is due to the bending of spacetime. A full century later, we're seeing his predictions verified with exquisite precision."
Even more than verifying Einstein, LIGO's detection of gravitational waves provides science with a new tool with which to potentially answer many more basic questions.
And it might lead researchers to the next great scientific theory, Perimeter researcher Luis Lehner said during the "Ripple Effects" panel hosted by Perimeter following the LIGO announcement. "When we can get more and more data, we might be able to see departures [from what is expected], and that may guide us in what replaces relativity," he said.
As more gravitational wave detectors come online in the next few years, scientists will be able to glean increasingly rich information about the universe around us. "That will give us a very important network that will allow us to ... reduce serendipity from astronomy, at least for some sources," Lehner said.
For many scientists, the most exciting prospect is that gravitational wave astronomy could enable researchers to probe the "dark" universe: objects and forces that don't absorb, reflect, or emit light, yet make up 96 percent of the universe.
Perimeter Associate Faculty member Avery Broderick said this is a seismic shift in astronomy, which has been studying the light side of the universe for 10,000 years.
"When we get this new window on the universe, history and experience has shown us that we find something totally different, something totally unexpected. This has happened over and over again in astronomy, where we've opened up windows in the X-ray and the radio, and we see a totally different universe," Broderick said.
"I would be shocked if we don't see the same thing when we look with gravitational eyes, and see the gravitational wave universe as totally different. This is going to be absolutely critical to understanding how the dark universe and the light universe fit together."
The Daily Galaxy via The Perimeter Institute
Image credit: Binary black hole wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons
