Gravity Waves confirmed.

[John Collins]

Physicists have announced the discovery of gravitational waves, ripples in spacetime first anticipated by Albert Einstein a century ago.

“We have detected gravitational waves. We did it,� said David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo), at a press conference in Washington.

The announcement is the climax of a century of speculation, 50 years of trial and error, and 25 years perfecting a set of instruments so sensitive they could identify a distortion in spacetime a thousandth the diameter of one atomic nucleus across a 4km strip of laserbeam and mirror.

The phenomenon was detected by the collision of two black holes. Using the world’s most sophisticated detector, the scientists listened for 20 thousandths of a second as the two giant black holes, one 35 times the mass of the sun, the other slightly smaller, circled around each other.

At the beginning of the signal, their calculations told them how stars perish: the two objects had begun by circling each other 30 times a second. By the end of the 20 millisecond snatch of data, the two had accelerated to 250 times a second before the final collision and dark merger.

The observation signals the opening of a new window on to the universe.

[Courtesy of The Guardian]

JC

[AB Hammer]

Thanks for the update JC
One step closer to truly understand gravity.

[Gill Simo]

Well...nice to see that the science community, at least, is getting to the point, that it's two points...& the motion about/between them.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35524440 (1st video)

[Phaedrus]

So what did the exalted physicist Albert Einstein say about Perpetual Motion Machines? He is all in the news now due to the verification of the existence of gravity waves, which they say he predicted, and he was a patent clerk after all...