SCOTTISH scientists have hailed the dawn of a new way of probing the deepest mysteries of the cosmos as a device they helped design picked up evidence of gravitational waves predicted by Albert Einstein for the second time in three months.
An international team, which included many researchers from the University of Glasgow, spotted the phenomenon on Boxing Day but has only now made the news public.
As with the earlier detection which stunned the world of science when it was revealed in February, the source was revealed to be two colliding and merging black holes which unleashed massive forces that rippled out across space.
The second discovery is further proof that the technique works and transforms the project from simple detection to the beginning of Gravitational Astronomy, allowing the team to begin the hunt for other violent cosmic events in earnest
It also proved for the first time that the at least one of the black holes, located some 1.4 billion light years away, were spinning at the moment they collided at a speed of more than 25 times a second.
The event caused a quantity of energy roughly equivalent to the mass of the Sun to be converted into gravitational waves which were blasted out in all directions .
The waves were "captured" by the twin LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) detectors located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, US as they passed through the earth, in part thanks to incredibly sensitive equipment installed by the Glasgow team.
“We know from this second detection that the properties being measured by LIGO will allow us to start to answer some key questions with gravitational astronomy.
"Mysteries still to be explained include: how do such black hole systems form? In future we'll study this through cosmic history aiming to fill in the 'missing links' in our knowledge,” said Professor Sheila Rowan, Director of the University of Glasgow’s Institute for Gravitational Research, and a member of the discovery team.
Professor Graham Woan, of the University of Glasgow’s Institute for Gravitational Research added: “These new signals not only map out the final second of action before two black holes collide, they also reveal how at least one of the black holes was spinning, a crucial factor in determining how they were formed in the first place.
"We are expecting to learn a great deal more from the next observing run of these telescopes, and can hardly wait.”
Gravitational waves are predicted in Einstein's Theory Of General Relativity, which shows how gravity arises from mass curving space and time.
They are ripples in space-time that propagate as waves. Anything in their path, from humans to whole planets, is made to stretch and compress slightly as the fabric of space-time is distorted.
Each of the Ligo detectors, consisting of an incredibly sensitive system of mirrors and lasers, is also made to "wobble", but only on a scale thousands of times smaller than the width of the nucleus of an atom.
The University of Glasgow’s Institute for Gravitational Research led on the conception, development, construction and installation the mirrors in the heart of the LIGO detectors, which has been said to be crucial to the first observations.
The Ligo Scientific Collaboration consists of more than 1,000 scientists from 17 countries, including researchers from 10 UK universities - Glasgow, Birmingham, Cardiff, Strathclyde, West of Scotland, Sheffield, Edinburgh, Cambridge, King's College London and Southampton.
Professor Ken Strain, Deputy Director of the University of Glasgow’s Institute for Gravitational Research and Principal Investigator of the UK Advanced LIGO programme, said: “The whole team at the University of Glasgow is delighted that our joint effort over several decades has been critical to enabling the new field of ground-based gravitational astronomy.”
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