Scientists from the LIGO collaboration have managed to record gravitational waves for the first time in history, which will be announced next week. This was reported to Gazeta. Ru by a source close to the collaboration.
Probably, the corresponding scientific article will be presented in the journal Nature. This follows from a letter that theoretical physicist Clifford Burjess from Canada sent a number of colleagues by email. This letter was published on the official website of Science magazine on Friday evening Moscow time. The letter says that the LIGO collaboration has detected gravitational radiation caused by the merger of a binary system of black holes with masses of 36 and 29 solar masses into an object with a mass of 62 solar masses. According to modern concepts, when rotating around a common center of mass, a system of two black holes loses energy due to the radiation of gravitational waves. In the final stage, a collision and asymmetric gravitational collapse occurs. This process takes a split second,and during this time in gravitational radiation - ripples of space-time - energy, which is, according to some estimates, more than 50% of the mass of the system.
Burjess himself clarified that he had not seen the publication, but he knows about it from the words of colleagues who are familiar with the article.
Earlier, Laurence Krauss, a cosmologist from Arizona State University, repeatedly wrote about the discovery of gravitational waves in his twitter, although the press service of LIGO did not confirm his message. On Friday, Krauss announced that a special press conference is scheduled for February 11 in Washington.
The search for gravitational waves is one of the biggest problems in modern physics. According to the general theory of relativity (GR) of Albert Einstein, any matter moving with acceleration creates a perturbation of space-time - a gravitational wave. This disturbance is the greater, the higher the acceleration and mass of the object. Due to the weakness of gravitational forces in comparison with other fundamental interactions, these waves should have a very small value, which is difficult to register.
The LIGO observatory consists of two L-shaped systems formed by two arms of 4 km each. A gravitational wave has the property of changing the metric, that is, hitting the device, it will change the length of the arm of each of the systems, and the laser interferometer will record this change.