A group of researchers has observed directly gravitational waves – ripples in space-time theorized by Einstein – for the second time : is the confirmation of the beginning of a new was astronomy.
Just like the first, historical observation announced last February, the second is the result of a cataclysmic “hug” between two blacks holes occurred over a billion years ago. The merger of the two objects sent gravitational waves through the universe, and these were detected as they pass on Earth.
The gravitational waves, the result of the most violent events that occur in the universe (as is the fusion of blacks holes or the collision of ultra-dense neutron stars) offer to astrophysical a whole new way to observe the universe, making them potentially able to measure and study things invisible at any wavelength of light.
This second survey is important because it means that the previous one, carried out by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), not
was a mere fluke but just the first of hundreds, if not thousands of other observations to come.
“If you find a wonderful event once, it is amazing, but it seems almost a miracle,” says astrophysicist France Córdova, director of the National Science Foundation, the US government agency that finances LIGO .
“But when it happens a second time, we have the proof that we have really a new way of looking at the universe.”
the first survey, conducted September 14, 2015, awarded a century of research by astrophysicists, it began in 1916, when Albert Einstein theorized the existence.
the first observation of LIGO concerned the merger of two blacks massive holes about 30 times that of the sun. the second involves two objects of varying sizes: a massive black hole 14 times that of the Sun, and another of 7.5.
When these blacks holes have merged, they created a new black hole about 21 times the mass of the Sun, releasing energy equivalent to that which our star produce throughout his 10 billion years of life.
the echoes of that collision have traveled across the cosmos for 1.4 billion years, passing through the Earth December 26, 2015.
With the help of lasers and mirrors are located kilometers away, the two detectors L-shaped in Louisiana and Washington have detected the tiny ripples, which have “stretched” the Land of amplitude less than a ten-thousandth of a proton, one of the particles that make up the nucleus of an atom.
About 70 seconds later, the physicist Chad Hanna of the Pennsylvania State University received a phone call while on vacation with family. “It was crazy,” says Hanna, one of the directors of the LIGO group to detect the fusion of blacks holes. “I jumped on the chair. My family was quite worried. “
Hanna, and with him a thousand other scholars and technicians, were still committed to verify the detection of the previous September, and have worked twice as hard to analyze the second observation, described in the article published on June 15 to Physical Review Letters .
having Serbia in the second detection even before announcing the first scientists of the LIGO encouraged to submit their first discovery, considered one of the most important in decades.
the announcement of the second observation comes at a time when the prospect of astronomy based on gravitational waves could not be more promising. the LIGO, the researchers point out, he is operating at a third of its detection capability. If advances will proceed as planned, the observatory will be able by 2019 to observe a portion of the cosmos 27 times greater, and this is practically a guarantee of more detections of gravitational waves.
“The era of astronomy of gravitational waves is coming,” says astronomer Scott Ransom of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. “It’s a fantastic thing.”
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