A ground-breaking discovery has recently been made in the field of astrophysics that would help scientists fully understand gravity. What the great scientist of all time Albert Einstein predicted a century ago about the presence of gravitational waves in the space is now real with discovery of these waves. The new discovery would also help the scientists understand and explain the Big Bang. According to scientists of LIGO Laboratory, USA, that has made this discovery, when two black holes collided some 1.3 billion years ago, the joining of those two great masses sent forth a vibration that hurtled through space and reached Earth on September 14, 2015. Here is how this wobble has been described: "It looked like a chirp, it looked at something that started at low frequencies, sweeping very rapidly up over just a fraction of a second... up to 150 hertz or so, sort of near middle C on a piano."
And these ripples were picked up by the sophisticated instruments by the researchers of the LIGO Laboratory. Scientists are now able to hear the sound of gravitational waves and the magnitude of the recent discovery has been compared to Galileo’s use of telescope four centuries ago.
It has been in the discussion that the new discovery would certainly win a Nobel Prize in physics for the relevant scientists. Surely while researching for the gravitational waves, winning a Nobel was not in their minds. But the discovery itself is a great prize for humanity. According to a report served by AFP, it took scientists months to verify their data and put it through a process of peer-review before announcing about the discovery recently. And indeed it marked the culmination of decades of efforts by teams of some 1,000 scientists from 16 countries.
When the news of the recent discovery went to Stephen Hawking, an outstanding expert on black holes, he described it a moment in scientific history. Now the scientists believe that a window on the universe has opened through the discovery of gravitational waves.
However, the days will be not very far when mankind will be able to unravel the mystery of the universe and creation. Compared to the present-day knowledge about the universe, man seemed to be in the dark several centuries ago. But that does not mean that the efforts of our forefathers to understand the universe were futile. Far from it, in their standards, they were certainly ahead of their forefathers. One generation hands over its knowledge to another coming generation and man’s spirit of enquiry and discovery will go on.