🚨BREAKING: Scientists have detected low-frequency gravitational waves for the first time, providing evidence of large-scale motion in the universe caused by black holes and neutron star collisions.
Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time caused by the most energetic events in the cosmos. That's the news of the Big Announcement that scientists will unveil today at the conference.
Gravitational waves, first predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, are ripples in the fabric of space-time caused by the most energetic events in the cosmos, such as black hole mergers and neutron star collisions.
Detecting and studying these waves provides valuable insights into the fundamental nature of the universe. Scientists sometimes compare these ripples to the background music of the universe.
In early 2015, scientists used an experiment called LIGO to detect gravitational waves for the first time and showed that Einstein was right. But so far, these methods have only been able to capture waves at high frequencies, explained NANOGrav member Chiara Mingarelli, an astrophysicist at Yale University.
What have scientists actually discovered? Scientists have observed faint ripples caused by the movement of black holes that gently stretch and compress everything in the universe.
They reported that they were able to "hear" so-called LOW FREQUENCY gravitational waves, which are the changes in the fabric of the universe created by huge objects moving and colliding in space.
In the most recent research, scientists were looking for waves at much lower frequencies. These slow ripples can take years or even decades to rise and fall, and they likely come from some of the largest objects in our universe: supermassive black holes billions of times the mass of our sun.
Galaxies across the universe are constantly colliding and merging. When this occurs, astronomer Szabolcs Marka of Columbia University, who was not involved in the study, explained that scientists think the massive black holes at the centers of these galaxies also come together and engage in a dance before collapsing into one another. other.
Black holes emit gravitational waves as they circulate in these pairs, known as binaries.
"Binaries of supermassive black holes, slowly and quietly orbiting each other, are the tenors and bass of the cosmic opera," said Marka.
No instrument on Earth could capture the ripples of these giants. So "we had to build a detector that was roughly the size of the galaxy," said NANOGrav researcher Michael Lam of the SETI Institute.
