When many of us first heard about gravitational waves and saw Robert Hurt's dramatic depiction of those undulations in the fabric of spacetime caused by the mammoth collision of a pair of black holes, we were awed. Nathan Myhrvold, the polymath behind Modernist Cuisine, was awed, but he was inspired as well. To make a soup bowl.
On Thursday, the scientists at LIGO announced they'd officially found gravitational waves. This truly is a remarkable discovery, and confirms the final piece of Einstein's general theory of relativity. Read more about the announcement, and what it means for science, here. And check out our gravitational waves explainer for more background on this scientific phenomenon.
For months, the science world has been buzzing about the rumor that gravitational waves, the ripples in spacetime that Einstein predicted a hundred years ago, have finally been detected. Today, at press conferences all over the world, researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) confirmed that the hype is true.
Physicists have been buzzing (or rather, tweeting) about the possibility that the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) experiment finally discovered gravitational waves. LIGO has been searching for these cosmic ripples for over a decade. Last September, it upgraded to Advanced-LIGO, a more sensitive system that's also better at filtering out noise. Advanced-LIGO has a much stronger chance of collecting concrete evidence of gravitational waves—if it hasn't already.
Black holes aren't just ultra-massive collapsed stars that trap light with the sheer force of their gravitational waves. They're also very difficult objects to model--especially when they interact with other black holes. This image from a recent study represents a good first impression of what two black holes might look like as they come close to slamming into one another. There are only two bodies pictured, but their mass bends the starlight around them in strange ways, creating the impression of several orbs.