SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – Researchers have recently made new findings when it comes to how we peer into space, as four individual teams of scientists have shared their findings on gravitational waves being detected in space.
To explain the findings, Dr. Luke Zoltan Kelly, an astrophysicist at UC Berkeley, spoke with KCBS Radio’s Alisa Clancy.
For more, stream KCBS Radio now.
Kelly shared that the scientists have found evidence of gravitational waves, which he said are “ripples in the very fabric of space-time.”
“This is something that Einstein’s theory of relativity predicted almost a hundred years ago, but it was only detected for the very first time about 10 years ago,” Kelly said. “What’s new with the very recent discoveries is that it’s a completely different regime than what was detected before. Instead of seeing these ripples oscillate hundreds of times a second, it takes these ripples about 10 years to complete a single oscillation.”
When it comes to where the gravitational waves are coming from, Kelly says they aren’t “100% sure just yet,” being that they don’t have the smoking gun and only just started getting good measurements, but they have one theory that seems the most likely.
“What we believe is the case is that they’re coming from pairs of supermassive black holes,” Kelly said. “Supermassive black holes live in the centers of nearly all galaxies, and they’re billions of times the mass of the sun, but they only take up about as much space as the solar system.”
Kelly says that when two black holes orbit each other in a binary, their gravitational influence is so strong that they create ripples that propagate outward from the system. These waves are so strong that they believe that’s what scientists are detecting here on Earth.
While it currently remains a hypothesis, Kelly says that if proven true, the existence of the two black holes would be huge.
“There are huge implications. If they are from binary, then this is the first confirmation that supermassive black hole binaries actually exist, as they’ve been theorized for about 50 years or so but we just haven’t been able to detect them using traditional telescopes.”
Even bigger, Kelly says that the detection of gravitational waves has given scientists a “new way” of looking into the universe beyond the means of typical telescopes.
Related
Related
DOWNLOAD the Audacy App
SIGN UP and follow KCBS Radio