WASHINGTON—In an announcement that electrified the world of astronomy, scientists said Feb. 11 that they have finally detected gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago.
Astronomers hailed the finding as an achievement of historic proportions, one that opens the door to a new way of observing the cosmos and the violent collisions that are constantly shaping it.
For them, it’s like turning a silent movie into a talkie because these waves are the soundtrack of the universe.
“Until this moment, we had our eyes on the sky and we couldn’t hear the music,” said Columbia University astrophysicist Szabolcs Marka, a member of the discovery team. “The skies will never be the same.”
An all-star international team of astrophysicists used a newly upgraded and excruciatingly sensitive $1.1 billion set of twin instruments known as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, to detect a gravitational wave generated by the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion light-years from Earth.
