The discovery of gravitational waves and what it means for science

As many of you have probably heard over the last week, scientists were able to confirm the existence of gravitational waves. These waves were theorized by Albert Einstein over 100 years ago in his relativity theory although he didn't have a way to prove it. The gravitational waves are created when two massive objects (eg. black holes) collide. Right before they merge, they send out a massive wave of energy that is greater than all of the stars in the universe combined. That is an amazing amount of energy dispersed which is almost impossible to fathom. That wave is sent out at the speed of light, but it differs from photons (light particles) since it does not interact with physical matter. This also makes them very hard to detect and why even Einstein wasn't fully confident in their existence. That is where LIGOs comes in. LIGOs (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) is a large scale physics experiment in which a laser is split by a mirror and then sent down two tunnels that are two and a half miles long. The split lasers are then bounced back to the original starting point and their light wavelengths are measured. If there is any difference between the two, that shows a detection of a gravitational wave. The reason is because the wave is actually warping everything in such a tiny amount that it actually changes the length of the one tunnel before the other even though it's a minuscule amount.  Now, in order to prove that it truly is a gravitational wave and not some unknown interference on earth, two of these facilities have been built. One is in Washington state and the other is in Louisiana. They are thousands of miles apart because it cuts down on any possible interference or a random anomaly. Since both detected the same disturbance within a fraction of a second, it confirmed a gravitational wave. More of these facilities are going to be built in the near future around the world to make them even more accurate and pinpoint exactly where these waves originate. This wave originated approximately 1.3 billion lightyears away where two black holes around 30 times the mass of the sun merged together.

So, now that I've tried to explain what a gravitational wave is to the best of my abilities, I'll tell you what this discovery means for science. When we look through a telescope, we are viewing the photons coming off of the object we are viewing. Either the object is creating the light (stars) or is having light reflected off of it (moons, planets, etc.). The problem with only using this method to view celestial objects is that light interacts with matter. It can be clouded by gases or dust by the milky way galaxy which keeps us from viewing very distant objects. Since gravitational waves do not interact with matter, we can detect waves that originated from all over the universe. This should allow us to look even farther back in time and help us try to understand the origin of the universe. This is one of the greatest discoveries in science in the modern era. I hope you guys enjoyed my blog and hopefully I can answer any questions you may have in the comments.