Gravitational Waves Detected at LIGO?

[Math Amateur]

There are rumours that scientists at Advanced LIGO have detected gravitational waves ... it is about 100 years after Einstein predicted they were there in his mathematical theory of general relativity ...

Anyone know more about this rumour ...?

Peter

 

[topsquark]

There are rumours that scientists at Advanced LIGO have detected gravitational waves ... it is about 100 years after Einstein predicted they were there in his mathematical theory of general relativity ...

Anyone know more about this rumour ...?

Peter

It seems they are still holding the press conference this Thursday so I'd expect them to say they've verified it.

Yay! (Party)

-Dan

 

[Math Amateur]

There are rumours that scientists at Advanced LIGO have detected gravitational waves ... it is about 100 years after Einstein predicted they were there in his mathematical theory of general relativity ...

Anyone know more about this rumour ...?

Peter

Does anyone have an accurate but simple description of exactly what gravitational waves are ... and why discovering them is important ...

I have only the very vaguest of ideas ...

Peter

 

[topsquark]

Does anyone have an accurate but simple description of exactly what gravitational waves are ... and why discovering them is important ...

I have only the very vaguest of ideas ...

Peter

Do you like to cook?

Imagine you have an egg beater and you are mixing something at the center of the bowl. Notice that there are little waves in the batter that are moving out to the edges. A cosmological example of this would be two very massive objects orbiting each other rapidly. There is a set of "waves" that propagate outward from the center, just like with the egg beater. These are gravitational waves.

There are two theoretical reasons why we want to detect gravitational waves. First General Relativity predicts them. Second, what we know of Quantum gravity predicts them. So we'd better be able to find them at some point or the theories are in trouble. But gravitational waves are very weak...it takes a large disturbance like two rapidly orbiting massive bodies to be able to measure them. So a lot of effort and ingenuity has been used to come up with experiments.

As to any practical use of gravitational waves I can't think of many off the top of my head. The big thing I can think of is as a telescope: Gravitational waves are able to penetrate into objects where light cannot go. So we could, in theory, use them to probe the inside of the Earth to study its structure. But such applications are a long way off.

-Dan

 

[MarkFL]

I always figured that it was only a matter of time before sensitive enough instruments would be built and gravitational waves would be detected and the predictions of the theories verified. It is nice though to see such profound theories stand the tests of time. :D

 

[Ackbach]

Well, LIGO came out with the announcement/claim that they did, in fact, find gravitational waves. Exciting!