Scientists Find Eintein's Gravitational Waves

On February 11th 2016, a team of scientists announced that they had successfully detected the existence of gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are ripples in space time that were first predicted by Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Researchers discovered the gravitational waves as the result of two colliding black holes.

The discovery was made by scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). The gravitational waves were first discovered on September 14 2015 by LIGO detectors in Livingston, Louisiana and Hanford, Washington. What they detected was two huge black holes, one 35 time the mass of our sun and the other 29 times our sun's mass, circling each other.

Scientist listened to the two black holes which were 1.3 billion light years from Earth, and somewhere beyond the Magellanic Cloud. They listened for a 20th of a second. At first the two black holes circled each other at a rate of 30 time a second. After 20 milliseconds the two objects were circling each other at a rate of 250 times a second, before they finally collided with each other.

Working in unison, the two detectors picked up minute vibrations from the gravitational waves as they passed by the Earth. The scientist then converted those vibrations into audio waves and listened to the sound of the two black holes as they merged. The sound that was played back, was "a low rumbling pierced by chirps." The gravitational waves only changed LIGO's instruments by one ten thousandth the size of a proton.

The researchers believe that because gravitational waves are so radically different from electromagnetic waves, they will ultimately reveal some very big and unexpected surprises about the universe.