ANT KATZ with JNS.org

The discovery was announced by David Reitze, executive director of the US-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), during a press conference in Washington, DC last Thursday afternoon. 

Reitze said that the gravitational waves had, in fact, been detected on 14 September 2015, by both of the twin LIGO detectors in Livingston, Louisiana and Hanford, in Washington State.

RIGHT: David Reitze making the announcement last week

Einstein’s theory stipulated that gravitational waves are produced from the merger of two black holes. The only problem has been that in the hundred-plus years since the famous theory, a collision that has never been observed.

The reason for this is likely a combination of the rarity of such events and the ability of human sciences to detect them.

But this time, without question, Earth was hit on 14 September last year.

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Like ripples from a rock in a pond

“Gravitational waves, sort of at a fundamental level, are very similar” to the results one gets when one throws a rock into a pond of water, explained Reitze.

The difference, he says, is that In this case, instead of a moving rock and a still pond, there are two massive objects, both accelerating at high speeds in the emptiness of space.

Once one has two massive objects moving and accelerates towards one another, this will lead to them eventually orbiting around one another. This is what creates the ripples that travel outward, proffered Einstein, and that’s what a gravitational wave is.

RIGHT: Dr Albert Einstein is widely considered to have been one of the greatest theoretical physicists of all time

The result is that, unlike being contained to a single plane like the ripples a rock creates on the flat surface of a a pond, these ripples in “are in space themselves,” he said.

According to estimates by LIGO scientists, the pair of observed black holes were about 29 and 36 times bigger than the mass of the sun, respectively, and their collision took place 1.3 billion years ago.

“It’s a tremendously important discovery. It’s something that tells us something we didn’t already know, which is in this case that it’s possible to have a binary black hole (BBH). We never knew that before. We know from previous work that neutron stars, which turn into pulsars, can be binary, that they can be in pairs,” John Mather, a senior scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), told Reuters.

An artist’s impression of twin black holes generating gravitational waves as they collided and went into orbit around each other some 1.3 billion years ago. The wave reached Earth last September.

A BBH is a system consisting of two black holes in close orbit around each other. A pulsar (short for pulsating radio star) is a highly magnetized, rotating neutron star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation which can only be observed when the beam of emission is pointing toward Earth (much the way a lighthouse can be seen only when the light is pointed in the direction of an observer), and is responsible for the pulsed appearance of emission.

“We never knew for sure that they would be stars that could turn into black holes in pairs and then merge together to form this coalescing black hole and make this huge burst of gravitational energy to come out. So this is a spectacular new result for astronomy,” John Mather, a senior scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), told Reuters.

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Not without controversy

Last week Hebrew University of Jerusalem also held a news conference to unveil documents related to Einstein’s gravitational waves theory.

Israeli real estate magnate and New City Ltd. Chairman Dror Halevi, however, took the opportunity to criticize Israeli society’s attitude toward the famous scientist.

“In 2015, the world marked the 100-year anniversary of the theory of relativity through celebrations, but [in Israel, Einstein] didn’t even make the school curriculum… We’re talking about one of the people who most influenced mankind…

“As the most important Jew in the world we need to have him among us,” Halevi said, as translated from the Hebrew news website Walla.