Gravitational wave detector confirms theories of Einstein and Hawking

Summary

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is celebrating 10 years of cutting-edge gravitational wave science by confirming predictions made by physics luminaries Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Roy Kerr — and potentially revealing a path toward a theory of quantum gravity.LIGO achieved this latest milestone by detecting gravitational waves, or tiny ripples in spacetime. The existence of gravitational waves was first predicted by Einstein in his 1915 theory of gravity, general relativity. The newly detected ripples resulted from the collision of two black holes, each estimated to have a mass around 32 times that of the sun. In just four days, on September 14, LIGO will celebrate exactly 10 years since it made the very first detection of gravitational waves. This signal, designated GW150914, had traveled about 1.3 billion years to reach Earth. Its detection represented an entirely new method of astronomy — a way to "hear" spacetime ringing after some of the most powerful events in the cosmos rather than "see" them by relying on electromagnetic radiation. Since then, LIGO and its gravitational wave detecting partners, Virgo and the Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA), have detected a multitude of gravitational wave signals from other black hole collisions, mergers between neutron stars, and even from two rare "mixed mergers" involving a neutron star and a black hole. "This is the clearest view yet of the nature of black holes," Maximiliano Isi, a member of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration from the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics, said in a statement. "We've found some of the strongest evidence yet that astrophysical black holes are the black holes predicted from Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity." Black hole theories validated by new gravitational wave signal This newly detected signal, GW250114, stands among previous detections as one of the clearest gravitational wave signals ever."GW250114 i...