The head of the lab that detected gravitational waves explains them

World Today

Simulation photo from LIGO/Caltech/SXS project

David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Laboratory, announced last week that his lab had discovered the first evidence of gravitational waves. CCTV America caught up with Reitze after his announcement in Washington D.C. Here’s how he explained the findings.

LIGO Laboratory Executive Director David Reitze.

LIGO Laboratory Executive Director David Reitze.

The detected gravitational waves were produced during the final fraction of a second of the merger of two black holes to produce a single, more massive spinning black hole. This collision of two black holes had been predicted but never observed.

David Reitze explains the findings

The discovery is considered one of the breakthroughs in modern science, and scientists who made the achievement believe that it will affect the future development of astronomy.

The findings are huge, Reitze says

The two black holes that collided and merged were each about 30 times the mass of the sun, LIGO said. The event took place 1.3 billion years ago.

How confident are you in these findings?

The findings were announced nearly 100 years after Albert Einstein’s prediction of this breakthrough in his theory of general relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics.

How was Einstein able to predict all this?