gravitational waves detected

[Danzig]

http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/11/us/gra...eat/index.html


Einstein was right.

Just over 100 years after he published his general theory of relativity, scientists have found what Albert Einstein predicted as part of the theory: gravitational waves.



"We have detected gravitational waves. We did it," said David Reitze, executive director of LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which was created to do just what Reitze announced.


awesome stuff!!!


However, the waves are so small that it takes a detector like LIGO, capable of measuring distortions one-thousandth the size of a proton, to observe them. They were observed on September 14, 2015.

Scientists heard the sound of the black holes colliding as a "chirp" lasting one-fifth of a second. Though gravitational waves aren't sound waves, the increase in frequency the collision exhibited in its last milliseconds -- when the black holes were mere kilometers apart and growing closer -- is a frequency we can hear, said Deirdre Shoemaker, a Georgia Tech physicist who works on LIGO.

newton would be thrilled if he knew....