Gravitational waves detected?

[I Think]

An international effort to detect ripples in space itself has scheduled a "status report" for Thursday.
These gravitational waves were first proposed 100 years ago by Albert Einstein, as a key prediction of his Theory of General Relativity.
But in decades of searching they have never been detected, despite several years of operation from two huge laser instruments in the US and one in Italy.
Teams from the US detectors will speak in Washington DC at 15:30 GMT Thursday.
Speculation is rife that they will announce the detection of gravitational waves by both the US instruments, which together make up the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (Ligo).

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35533241

[maryjane48]

i will wager yes . one of the things that is hard to visualize is the fact that since the speed of light limits how far out we will ever be able to see , our universe could infact be limitless .


we do know that space time expanded faster than light in the expansion phase and that the farther a object is from us the faster it is going which means beyond our range of sight , the universe could be expanding faster than light still .


so that all means gravitational waves caused by say 2 black holes colliding ,should show up because space time expands flat . we just needed the tools sensitive enough to measure them .


i wonder how many people realize that if you look at a galaxy going away from us , it isnt the galaxy thats moving away , it is the space between thats moving apart

[Sonny Taylor]

What rather blew mind is they didn't simply detect gravitational waves; They were able to tease out the following details out of the signal:

- Where in the sky they came from
- How far away the event that caused them was
- The individual masses of the two merging black holes that were the trigger.

No doubt some very fancy math was involved.