The final round of the universe that Einstein imagined – ElEspectador.com

If you are certain ads that are replicated in various astrophysical Twitter since last Tuesday echoed a rumor that he was born in Canada, science now know a story that has been waiting for a hundred years the discovery of gravitational waves, a phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity and checked opens a new door for the study of the universe

So far, among the guild of astrophysicists. no one doubted the existence of this phenomenon, but could not have been corroborated. Therefore, mail that slipped earlier this week knocked out more than a scientist: “premiere … Someone is going to get a Nobel,” he appeared in the case of a email Clifford Burgess, a theoretical physicist at McMaster University in Hamilton (Canada). “The rumor about LIGO ‘said below- seems real. And apparently it will come out on February 11 in the journal Nature (no doubt with a press release). They must be vigilant. Spies who have seen the paper say they have managed to observe gravitational waves from a binary black hole … Apparently the signal is spectacular … Woohoo! (I hope). “

An image with these words is that replicated hundreds of users in the social network in the past three days, waiting for today at 10:30 am (EDT Colombia), the finding is confirmed. At that time, the team Observatory Laser Interferometry Gravitational Wave (LIGO, for its acronym in English), start from Washington, United States, leave a video where bright points.

If true the rumor, as it seems, says Hector Rago, PhD in Physics and a visiting professor of the Research Group on Relativity and Gravitation of the Industrial University of Santander (UIS), will open a new window in astronomy. “It’s the beginning of a new way of understanding the universe.”

A search for 100 years

At the end of November 2015 the whole world celebrated the first century of the Theory of Relativity. one hundred years

ago, remembered all, Einstein had removed the foundations of physics with a presentation in Berlin which has since become one of the strongest to understand the universe supports. Among his key points he was one although nobody gave by false check it had been the subject of decades: the so-called gravitational waves, in the words of Juan Diego Soler, a Colombian astrophysicist who lives in France, “are messengers of phenomena occurring in distant places and reveal the nature of events that shape the universe. ” In other words, the discovery of these waves would give substance to the theory of cosmic inflation and the Big Bang. That’s one of the best ideas we have about how our universe reached its size and what was the origin of its structure.

But skipping the theoretical complexity hide (such as those waves travel at a speed that coincides with that of light), these waves are only detected when they are the result of very violent events: collisions between black holes, when a black hole swallows a star, the explosion of a spernova or the outbreak that originated the Big Bang.

in fact, a couple of years ago the scientific guild was shocked when one of the most powerful observatories (the Bicep2 located at the South Pole), announced the discovery of gravitational waves a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang formed. But everything, as it was known then, was a fiasco. Between their measurements crossed interstellar dust that is only fragments compounds of carbon and silicon and similar to cigarette smoke had

That, hitherto it was the closest approach of science to this phenomenon, which at one moment seemed more a matter of science fiction. Rago, for example, remembers that once Kip Thorne, genius of modern astrophysics and the speaker in his ear to the government of Barack Obama on possible directions of its space policy, said in the nineties several astrophysicists that if they were not able to capture these waves, relativistic could go to seed potatoes. Thorne was who advised Christopher Nolan so he could shape the film Interestellar .

But now, more than a rumor that began with an email, the news seems to come with much certainty. And it is, in part, because behind it are a couple of sophisticated equipment: a pair of interferometers composed of two tunnels and four kilometers long used by some of the most accurate laser on the planet. It is located two detectors in Washington and Louisiana are ultra-precise. So Rago account, you are able to measure distances with an accuracy of the order of fractions of an atomic nucleus. And to achieve that accuracy has been since the time of Einstein’s main difficulty. But LIGO seems to have resolved. Such was his progress, which for some months those in charge changed their name to Advanced LIGO, something like “LIGO recharged”.

And, apparently, which caught these devices, says Soler, were waves from the merger of two black holes with masses as large as tens of times that of our Sun, not the big Bang. “That, perhaps, is the kind of signal observed for LIGO to be announced at the press conference that prepared the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States. If confirmed, this finding is not only directly prove one of the most interesting consequences of Einstein’s general relativity. We will need to expand our intuition from now to imagine the universe that will explore our children. “