Einstein's gravitational waves 'seen' from black holes

[Bohol]

New discovery.


Scientists are claiming a stunning discovery in their quest to fully understand gravity.
They have observed the warping of space-time generated by the collision of two black holes more than a billion light-years from Earth.
The international team says the first detection of these gravitational waves will usher in a new era for astronomy.
It is the culmination of decades of searching and could ultimately offer a window on the Big Bang.
The research, by the Ligo Collaboration, has been published today in the journalPhysical Review Letters.
The collaboration operates a number of labs around the world that fire lasers through long tunnels, trying to sense ripples in the fabric of space-time.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35524440

 

[Jubba_Man]

This is major news. I still have yet to read the paper but did a small project on the LIGO project many years ago and was always impressed by the sheer ingenuity of the setup. The thing is, everyone expected gravitational waves to exist as they are the last prediction of relativity theory to be experimentally verified. But just like the Higgs-boson all this is doing in the end is confirming something almost everyone expected to exist. It also leaves a big question mark on where fundamental physics research is heading. These waves are unfortunately of the "vanilla" variety and give no insights into the nature of the dark energy and the dark matter, which is disappointing from an experimentalist's perspective. Like the higgs-boson discovery, it gives practically no indication on how to move beyond the standard model at all. On the practical side of things, this discovery will have no effect because unlike EM radiation gravitational radiation can't just be made by oscillating a collection of charged particles like in any antenna. The gravitational coupling constant is many orders of magnitude smaller than the electromagnetic coupling constant. Also in relativity theory, gravitational waves are the byproducts of bends and curves in the fabric of space and not associated with a fundamental force that is associated with a force-mediating boson, which is unlike how the EM force is defined in standard quantum field theory. This is also one of the main reasons (if not the main one) why it is just so hard to quantize the gravitational interaction and again this discovery does not at all make that fundamental front any easier. It would have actually been more interesting in the long run if gravitational waves were not found at least from this perspective.