With New Gravitational-Wave Detectors, More Cosmic Mysteries Will Be Solved
With New Gravitational-Wave Detectors, More Cosmic Mysteries Will Be Solved
By Charles Q. Choi 13 hours ago Science & Astronomy
Spotting a few merging black holes was only the beginning.
An artist's illustration of two black holes spiraling together, creating gravitational waves in the process.(Image: © NASA)
The ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves have already helped answer major questions regarding the nature of matter and black holes. And upcoming gravitational-wave observatories both on Earth and in space could soon help solve some of the greatest mysteries in science.
"We're going to be able to learn a lot about the universe," said Cole Miller, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland, College Park.
The existence of gravitational waves was first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, gravity results from how mass warps space and time. When any object with mass moves, it generates gravitational waves that travel at the speed of light, stretching and squeezing space-time along the way.
Gravitational waves are extremely weak, making them extraordinarily difficult to sense, and even Einstein was uncertain whether they really existed and if they would get detected. After decades of work, researchers succeeded in discovering the first direct evidence of gravitational waves in 2015 using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).
More:
https://www.space.com/gravitational-waves-future-discoveries.html
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