US trio wins physics Nobel for detection of waves from black hole collisions
STOCKHOLM: US astrophysicists Barry Barish, Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss were awarded the Nobel Physics Prize on Tuesday for the discovery of gravitational waves, the Nobel jury said.
Predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago as part of his theory of general relativity, but only detected in 2015, gravitational waves are ‘ripples’ in the fabric of space-time caused by violent processes such as colliding black holes or the collapse of stellar cores.
Their discovery opens a door on the mysteries of the Universe.
“Their discovery shook the world,” said Goran K Hansson, the head of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences which selects the Nobel recipients.
Barish, Thorne and Weiss cocreated the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory ( LIGO) at the prestigious California Institute of Technology, which has taken home 18 Nobels since the prizes were first awarded in 1901.
The first-ever direct observation of gravitational waves was made in September 2015 at LIGO, the result of an event some 1.3 billion light-years away.
Since then, the enigmatic ripples have been detected three more times: twice more by LIGO and once by the Virgo detector located at the European Gravitational Observatory ( EGO) in Cascina, Italy.
“Gravitational waves spread at the speed of light, filling the Universe, as Albert Einstein described in his general theory of relativity. They are always created when a mass accelerates, like when an ice-skater pirouettes or a pair of black holes rotate around each other,” the Nobel jury explained.
“Einstein was convinced it would never be possible to measure them. The LIGO project’s achievement was using a pair of gigantic laser interferometers to measure a change thousands of times smaller than an atomic nucleus, as the gravitational wave passed the Earth.” — AFP