Black Hole Collision Creates Gravitational Waves, Confirming Einstein's Theory

When scientists captured the first evidence that proved an element of Einstein’s theory of relativity, a Cal State Fullerton professor working on the project had trouble believing it.

“The first thing that went through our minds is we have to check to make sure this is really real because this is an amazing event,” Cal State Fullerton physics professor Joshua Smith told City News Service. “So we did that for months. We did everything we could think of (to verify it)... It took me a long time to realize this was really true and sink in and understand what it means.”

The discovery of “gravitational waves” from the merging of two, dying black holes about 1.3 billion years ago “opens up a new form of astronomy,” Smith said.

The discovery was made a century after Albert Einstein in 1915 predicted the concept of gravitational waves, but he suspected they were so small they could never be detected, Smith said.

Smith was one of six primary editors, three in the U.S., on a paper about the breakthrough that was published in the journal “Physical Review Letters.”

There were 1,004 researchers from the U.S. and 14 other countries that teamed up on the project.

“We not only measured this interesting aspect of Einstein’s theory, but we’ve also discovered for the first time a system of two black holes that orbited around each other and merged into one final black hole -- the death of two black holes and the birth of a new one,” Smith said.

In essence, the scientists detected the waves and traced them back to the source.

The discovery was made at 5:51 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time, on Sept. 14, by the Louisiana and Washington state-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave observatories, also known as LIGO, that operate in conjunction.

“Now that we have this technology to see this we expect to see many more things,” Smith said.

“We can really draw a lot of information from these waves,” Smith said. “It gives us a better understanding how many black holes are out there.”

The black holes that merged each were about 30 times the mass of our sun, Smith said.

The breakthroughs in technology to make it happen already have had an impact on tech developed for everyday use, Smith said.

The exchange works both ways since breakthroughs in the electronics industry often improve the technology scientists use for their experiments, according to Smith, who said it’s not clear what will come of this discovery, Smith said.

“When Einstein first came up with his theory the implications were not clear,” Smith said. “There could be unforeseen implications 10, 20, 30 years down the road that will come from this that we can’t anticipate now.”

Smith joined the Cal State Fullerton faculty in 2010 to help build the gravitational-wave research program. He worked on the discovery with physics professors Jocelyn Read and Geoffrey Lovelace and math professor Alfonso Agnew.

Joseph Areeda, a computation specialist in Cal State Fullerton’s Gravitational-Wave Physics and Astronomy Center, joined the professors as a co- author of the scholarly paper.

City News Service