This post was written by Jorge Morales.
In 1916, Einstein predicted there are ripples in the fabric of space that travel through the universe at the speed of light. Today we know those ripples as gravitational waves. A century after Einstein’s prediction, science gave Einstein one of his biggest victories: the detection of gravitational waves. The detection came from gravitational waves emitted by black holes, which are the densest astrophysical bodies known in the universe, so dense that even light can’t escape their gravitational pull. Two black holes with a total mass of 65 solar masses (or 22 million Earth masses) danced around each other, until they collided to form a new black hole of 62 solar masses. The mass of approximately three solar masses was converted into the enormous energy that these gravitational waves carried. These waves traveled through space for more than a billion years, until the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) was able to catch them on September 14, 2015. (more…)