Scientists confirm having seen ripples in the fabric of spacetime

LONDON, 12 Feb. - (ANA) -Scientists say that the discovery is the biggest of the century — far more important than that of the Higgs boson
Gravitational ripples in the fabric of spacetime, first predicted by Albert Einstein 100 years ago, have now been detected by scientists who believe the discovery opens new vistas into the “dark” side of the Universe.
Gravitational ripples in the fabric of spacetime, first predicted by Albert Einstein 100 years ago, have now been detected by scientists who believe the discovery opens new vistas into the “dark” side of the Universe.

Physicists around the world confirmed that they had detected unambiguous signals of gravitational waves emanating from the collision of two massive black holes 1.5 billion light years away in deep space.

As the two black holes spiralled into one another in a violent collision that was over in a second, immense amounts of matter were instantly converted into energy, which sent shock waves travelling through space for 1.5 billion years until they were picked up by gravitational-wave instruments on Earth.
The detection of  gravitational waves not only confirms Einstein's general theory of relativity, it amounts to the first direct detection of a pair of colliding black holes, the mysterious structures in space that are so dense they exert a gravitational force from which nothing —not even light — can escape.

One senior British physicist described the breakthrough as the greatest scientific discovery so far this century. It is, he said, bigger than the discovery of the Higgs boson because of its ramifications for our basic understanding of the Universe and the possibility it creates for new ways of observing the hidden regions of space.

Two sets of super-sensitive instruments in two American observatories both detected the same sub-atomic movements in the spacetime continuum — the mathematical model that weaves space and time into a single entity — caused by the gravitational waves as they passed through the Earth.
The direct detection of gravitational waves will now enable astronomers to see the Universe in a different light, giving them an unprecedented opportunity to observe the “dark” side of the cosmos, almost back to the beginning of time itself.

It will enable scientists to build a network of gravitational-wave observatories both on Earth and in space that can see through billions of light years of the cosmic void. It will give astronomers the ability to witness collisions between black holes and the interactions of massive stellar objects, even providing them with a time-machine to look back almost to the time of the Big Bang 13.7bn years ago when the super-heated Universe began to cool down to form the the first atoms. - (ANA) -

AB/ANA/ 12 February 2016 - - -