
02-11-2016, 02:11 PM
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Dee Tee Stables
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Join Date: May 2006
Location: The Natural State
Posts: 29,940
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gravitational waves detected
http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/11/us/gra...eat/index.html
Einstein was right.
Just over 100 years after he published his general theory of relativity, scientists have found what Albert Einstein predicted as part of the theory: gravitational waves.
"We have detected gravitational waves. We did it," said David Reitze, executive director of LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which was created to do just what Reitze announced.
awesome stuff!!!
However, the waves are so small that it takes a detector like LIGO, capable of measuring distortions one-thousandth the size of a proton, to observe them. They were observed on September 14, 2015.
Scientists heard the sound of the black holes colliding as a "chirp" lasting one-fifth of a second. Though gravitational waves aren't sound waves, the increase in frequency the collision exhibited in its last milliseconds -- when the black holes were mere kilometers apart and growing closer -- is a frequency we can hear, said Deirdre Shoemaker, a Georgia Tech physicist who works on LIGO.
newton would be thrilled if he knew....
Last edited by Danzig : 02-11-2016 at 03:04 PM.
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