WASHINGTON — Scientists who have spent decades peering into outer space announced Thursday they have detected gravitational waves, the ripples in spacetime that Albert Einstein long ago predicted.
“We have detected gravitational waves. We did it!” David Reitze, a physicist and executive director of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, announced at the National Press Club in Washington, to applause.
Gravitational waves, often said to look like ripples in a pond, are able to answer questions about creation of astronomical phenomena and disturbances, such as the merging of black holes, collision of neutron stars, supernova explosions and more. Gravitational waves were discovered by physicist Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, 100 years ago.
All of Einstein’s theory had been proved except for the presence of gravitational waves, but that all changed Thursday.
“It’s mind-boggling,” Reitze said.
Einstein was right, said Rainer Weiss, co-founder of LIGO and a professor of physics emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“His equations have worked so well, in ways he never could have imagined,” Weiss said.
The discovery might be one of the major scientific discoveries in decades, just as important as Galileo and his telescope 400 years ago, Reitze said.
“As we open a new window into astronomy, we may see things we’ve never seen before,” Reitze said.
The waves were detected by LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which has facilities in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana.
Reitze described how, last Sept. 14, tiny blips of a signal, a “chirp,” were detected seven milliseconds apart by the massive observatories in Louisiana and Washington state. That signal led scientists to the collision of two black holes more than a billion years ago.
“Up until now, we have been deaf to the universe,” Reitze said. “Today, we were able to hear for the first time.”
These black holes were each about 93 miles in diameter — roughly 50 miles wider than the width of Washington, D.C.
“Pack 30 times the mass of the sun into that, then accelerate it to about half the speed of light,” and that is just for one black hole, Reitze said.
That collision unnerved nearby stars and caused ripples that spread outward, traveling for 1.3 billion light-years, passing through stars and other objects, until they reached Earth and were detected that September day. It was the exact way Einstein had predicted that gravitational waves would be discovered.
“The gravitational waves detected agree perfectly with predictions from Einstein’s theory of relativity,” said Kip Thorne, a co-founder of LIGO and a consultant for the 2014 movie “Interstellar.”
LIGO can measure this astronomical storm using two 4-kilometer-long (about two and a half miles), L-shaped lasers, two mirrors and a detector. The light from the lasers bounces off a mirror to the detector. When a gravitational wave passes by, the path of the laser stretches slightly and hits the detector a little differently.
“All of this technology wasn’t available to Einstein,” Weiss said. “I bet he would’ve invented LIGO.”
And this detection is just the beginning, Gonzalez said. “Now that we have detectors, now that we know it’s out there, we’ll be listening to the universe.”