Albert Einstein’s Century-Old Theory on Relativity Proved Right

This discovery hypothesised by physicist Albert Einstein a century ago opens a new window for studying the cosmos.

An artist’s rendering of an outburst on an ultra-magnetic neutron star also called a magnetar is shown in this handout provided by NASA on 10 February 2016. (Photo: Reuters)

Scientists said on Thursday that they have for the first time detected gravitational waves, ripples in space and time hypothesised by physicist Albert Einstein a century ago, in a landmark discovery that opens a new window for studying the cosmos.

The researchers said they detected gravitational waves coming from two black holes – extraordinarily dense objects whose existence also was foreseen by Einstein – that orbited one another, spiralled inward and smashed together. They said the waves were the product of a collision between two black holes 30 times as massive as the Sun, located 1.3 billion light years from Earth.

The announcement was made in Washington by scientists from the California Institute of Technology, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. An Indian scientist, a part of the team played an important role in this discovery. Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated the team for this milestone.

Einstein in 1916 proposed the existence of gravitational waves as an outgrowth of his ground-breaking general theory of relativity, which depicted gravity as a distortion of space and time triggered by the presence of matter. But until now scientists had found only indirect evidence of their existence.

(With Reuters inputs)