Hey star-gazers

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...two black holes collided in a fateful swirling

waltz. Just like when you toss a rock into a pond and the KERPLUNK creates ripples on

the surface of the water, this collision sent ripples through the fabric of space time.

And we finally detected one of these ripples or as researchers call them, gravitational

waves. We’ve been looking for these kinds of waves for a long time. Albert Einstein

first proposed their existence in his theory of relativity, OVER A HUNDRED YEARS AGO. So

we’ve been searching for them ever since.

And just how the ripples in the pond get smaller as they move further from the KERPLUNK point,

the ripples in spacetime get smaller too. That’s why they are so hard to detect. Until

now! Today (LIGO) or the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory announced that

they found the galactic KERPLUNK by detecting, or hearing, one of the ripples. shhh listen.

Ladies and gentlemen listen to that beautiful sound.

Ahh music to my ears.

This signal was seen on September 14th last year, but the cataclysmic event that caused

it happened nearly 1.3 billion years ago when two black holes collided.

While two black holes colliding has been theorized, it hasn’t been observed before. The theory

goes that two black holes will circle each other and lose energy that’s released as

gravitational waves. Over time, they will get closer and closer over the course of a

few billion years then finally collide in a fraction of a second. This releases a large

amount of mass as energy in the form of gravitational waves. In this case, the black holes were

about 30 times the mass of the Sun and were moving at half the speed of light in that

last fraction of a second. This huge impact sent a shock wave of gravitational waves,

or ripples in spacetime, through the universe at the speed of light.

But as massive as that collision was, the reverberations that reached us were tiny.

Like "one one thousandth the diameter of a proton," according David Reitze,(right-z)

the executive director of LIGO. LIGO was able to detect such a tiny wiggle by using two

labs - one in Livingston, Louisiana, and one in Hanford, Washington.

The labs used massive and precise lasers. Like 2.5-mile long lasers beams that can read

10,000 times smaller than a proton. These lasers were fired into two L shaped pipes

that bounced light around a series of mirrors. A strain in space-time would change the timing

of when the lasers reach their destination. And that’s just what happened on that fateful

day. The same wiggle showed up on the detectors in the two labs just 7 milliseconds apart.

And more incredible, these wiggles matched up to what supercomputer models of gravitational

waves had already predicted. Which were based off of calculations from Einstein’s theory

of relativity.

So it’s the real deal. We know have solid evidence of gravitational waves, and evidence

of binary black holes! And this discovery proves Einstein’s theory. FINALLY.

We’ve been searching for these guys for a century! Rumors have it that this discovery

could make the short list for a nobel prize!

Why? Well researchers are hailing that the discovery could be as exciting as when we

discovered x-rays. LIGO co-founder said it has “opened a new window onto the Universe".

Studying and tracking gravitational waves will help us better understand black holes,

supernovas, other really large space events and even possibly the fundamental laws of

the universe.

We’ll learn so much more about the universe and how it works as LIGO upgrades their equipment

to become more and more sensitive. And in a few decades the European Space Agency plans

to launch a space-based gravitational wave detector. So hopefully more gravitational

waves will be detected.

If you want to learn more about this amazing discovery, check out the study published in

the journal Physical Review Letters

Wow. Just wow guys. so much incredible science happening right now, in our lifetime! Einstein

would be so proud.

If gravitational waves seem like a familiar concept, it’s because we’ve talked about

them before on DNews. A telescope called BICEP2 is looking for evidence of gravitational waves

of a different kind, from the most cataclysmic event of all time, the big bang. To learn

more about that, check out these episodes, right here.