{"id":121946,"date":"2021-04-25T10:22:51","date_gmt":"2021-04-25T17:22:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/gravitational-waves-einsteins-ripples-in-spacetime-spotted-for-first-time"},"modified":"2021-04-25T10:22:51","modified_gmt":"2021-04-25T17:22:51","slug":"gravitational-waves-einsteins-ripples-in-spacetime-spotted-for-first-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/gravitational-waves-einsteins-ripples-in-spacetime-spotted-for-first-time","title":{"rendered":"Gravitational waves, Einstein\u2019s ripples in spacetime, spotted for first time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/OBybywdPa8U?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>This shows also the hertz of reality circa 2016.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Long ago, deep in space, two massive black holes\u2014the ultrastrong gravitational fields left behind by gigantic stars that collapsed to infinitesimal points\u2014slowly drew together. The stellar ghosts spiraled ever closer, until, about 1.3 billion years ago, they whirled about each other at half the speed of light and finally merged. The collision sent a shudder through the universe: ripples in the fabric of space and time called gravitational waves. Five months ago, they washed past Earth. And, for the first time, physicists detected the waves, fulfilling a 4-decade quest and opening new eyes on the heavens.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/news\/2016\/02\/here-s-first-person-spot-those-gravitational-waves\">Here\u2019s the first person to spot those gravitational waves<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The discovery marks a triumph for the 1000 physicists with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a pair of gigantic instruments in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. Rumors of the detection had circulated for months. Today, at a press conference in Washington, D.C., the LIGO team made it official. \u201cWe did it!\u201d says David Reitze, a physicist and LIGO executive director at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. \u201cAll the rumors swirling around out there got most of it right.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This shows also the hertz of reality circa 2016. Long ago, deep in space, two massive black holes\u2014the ultrastrong gravitational fields left behind by gigantic stars that collapsed to infinitesimal points\u2014slowly drew together. The stellar ghosts spiraled ever closer, until, about 1.3 billion years ago, they whirled about each other at half the speed of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121946\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}