MADRID (EFE) – Albert Einstein formulated his general theory of relativity the existence of gravitational waves, a kind of waves in the universe. But the scientific community has had to wait 100 years to be able to agree with evidence, one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century.
To demonstrate the existence of these waves was the ultimate challenge slope of the theory of general relativity, Einstein formulated in 1915. The University of the Balearic Islands in Spain, one of those involved in scientific collaboration LIGO (LIGO Scientific Collaboration in English), offers some answers to understand what they are and what they do on their website.
LIGO is a group of scientists dedicated to finding the first direct detection of gravitational waves, in order to use them in exploring the fundamental laws of gravity and the development of the emerging field of physics gravitational waves as a tool for scientific discovery.
What are gravitational waves?
Using a metaphor, the university defines as “waves in the cosmic ocean.” Einstein discovered the theory of relativity that the moving objects in the universe produce ripples in space-time (a kind of tissue in which all events of the universe take place) which propagate through space. These are the gravitational waves.
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What is you if any detected
gravitational waves are “a new window to the universe.” Thanks to them we can understand the mechanisms by which happen some of the most violent events in the cosmos, such as collisions between black holes and exploding stars. One could even consider what happened a millisecond after the Big Bang.
also mark the beginning of a new era in astronomy because the universe is almost transparent to them, which will observe astrophysical phenomena that would otherwise remain hidden -the formation of black holes or how matter behaves in extremas- conditions.
But, why are they so important to explore the universe?
Knowledge of the Cosmos is now done mainly through electromagnetic radiation (light), with them you can “see” while the gravitational waves would be like to “hear”, which would pass through the objects between the Earth and the other end of the universe, as the waves pass through all
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Why has it taken so long to find out for sure its existence?
for decades this new type of waves was almost ignored. Some scientists doubted their existence and others thought that are so weak that they could never be detected. But in the 1970s the discovery of pulsars neutron-stars that emit light by turning lie led to the first indirect evidence of their existence.
In addition, the effects of gravitational waves are so small that giant detectors need to try to find them.
How are these detectors?
These are huge facilities that use a technology called laser interferometry. The largest of these is the Observatory laser interferometer gravitational wave (LIGO) in the United States, other detectors are Virgo in Italy and the GEO600 in Germany.
So far, the detectors are at the surface, but in the future will be located underground and eLisa mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) will put a detector in space, allowing detect gravitational waves in a different range of frequencies.
Gravitational waves “contain the promise of the unknown,” says the informative page of scientific collaboration LIGO, because “every time humans have looked to the Cosmos with ‘eyes’ new’ve discovered something unexpected that it has revolutionized the way we view the universe and our place in it. ”
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