Nobel Committee
The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish, Kip Thorne for work that led to the discovery of ripples in space-time called gravitational waves.
All three are members of the LIGO-Virgo collaboration, a team of over a thousand scientists who in February last year announced that they had seen gravitational waves for the first time. Since then, three other detections of gravitational waves have been confirmed, the latest coming just last week.
Weiss told a press conference over the phone that the news was "really wonderful" but that he viewed it as something that was recognising the work of a thousand people over nearly 40 years.
Gravitational waves are created when two black holes merge. When a gravitational wave passes through space, space itself is seen to briefly stretch, then return to normal. The ripples in space-time were first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1919.
The first detection of gravitational waves came on 14 September 2015. The signal was first seen in Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, detector in Livingston, Louisiana. Just seven milliseconds later, the same signal was seen in LIGO’s second detector in Hanford, Washington.
The merging black holes that created the signal have masses equal to 29 and 36 suns, respectively, and are around 1.3 billion light years away.
LINK: It's True: Physicists Announce Discovery Of Gravitational Waves
LINK: These Astronomers Say Gravitational Waves Have Dramatically Changed How They Work
from BuzzFeed - Kelly Oakes http://ift.tt/2fIdeQc
