Sounds of Spacetime #1
8-bit signal waveform of the first direct detection of gravitational waves codenamed GW150914 (LIGO H1 Hanford Detector). Art is created from open-access publicly available data. Subject of Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 to Weiss, Thorne & Barish.
Description of the Cosmic Event:
Gravitational Waves are vibrations in the fabric of space-time that were predicted by Albert Einstein in 1915 and long dismissed as undetectable. They may be short pulses or long lasting signals that are emitted from extreme cataclysmic cosmic events such as Black hole collisions, Neutron star collisions, star collapses, and even the Big Bang.
Two black holes roughly 30 times the mass of our Sun collided 1 billion years ago at a distance of about 1 billion light years (10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000/10 sextillion km) from Earth, detected by LIGO Hanford detector (H1) on 14 September 2015, as a ridiculously minute flicker - a gravitational wave pulse - of an amplitude equivalent to resolving the thickness of human hair on Mars from Earth (a trillionth of the diameter of a proton). This discovery resulted in Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017 for Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne & Barry Barish, and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. Remarkably, the discovery was made exactly 100 years after its prediction by Einstein, who himself once regarded them as undetectable.
