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How would it be if two supermassive black holes spiraled and approached each other? With such intensity it would have caused a tremendous collision, and certainly caused ripples in space-known as Einstein's general theory of relativity. A hundred years have passed since Einstein first sparked his research on gravitational waves, but directly, the wave is still undetectable.
Astronomers in Australia have spent the last decade doing research when gravitational waves are released by a number of supermassive black holes moving around each other. They use the Parkes radio telescope in New South Wales. But until September, they could not find any trace of the wave.
****Is Einstein wrong? Or are we the less understand about the black hole?****
Space is flooded with gravitational waves, but they are very weak. No doubt gravitational waves are passing through you right now, stretching your body up or sideways, then suppressing you. However, the reason why you do not see it is because your height changes no more than the size of a proton.
Astronomer Ryan Shannon, who works at CSIRO and the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research in Perth, and his team sought to detect gravitational waves from black holes by measuring their effect on several radio-waves coming from Neutron stars over 3,600 million billion meters .
Neutron stars were discovered in 1967. They originate from larger core pieces of dead stars and have been destroyed when run out of fuel. Collapsed by the strength of their own gravity, then generate as much mass as the sun produced in our solar system. Then the Neutron star spins faster as it decays.
As they spin, some fractions radiate a focused beam of radiation like a lighthouse light. If the Earth lies in the direction of the radiation beam, we will detect this radiation as the pulsation of the radio waves, which then the Neutron stars get the pulsar nickname.
A pulsar will rotate so stable that the emitted waves can be ascertained as the accuracy of the rotation direction in the astronomical clock.
It took over the last 11 years for the CSIRO Parkes radio telescope to record the pulsating time of a single brightest regular pulsar. The pulsar rotates 300 rotations per second, and rotates 115,836,854,515 for more than a decade for its radiation to reach Earth. But according to Einstein, that's not the issue.
According to Einstein's theory, the gravitational ripples emitted by the countless rounds of black holes in the universe must cause something. For example, there is a stretch of space-time between the Earth and the pulsar each passing through 10 meters. This stretch warps the arrival time of the pulse wave pulse, one to ten billion seconds. Parkes telescope timekeeping equipment is accurate enough to detect such minute changes, and it turns out the telescope does not detect delays
Researchers have no doubt that gravitational waves do exist. They have been detected indirectly. American astronomers Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor won the 1993 Nobel Prize in physics for research on this subject. They used a pair of neutron stars to measure the year's trimming of the stars-about 30 seconds for more than three decades-because they spin up and away from each other. Hulse and Taylor calculated that the sum of the trimming was in line with Einstein's prediction. The energy that causes the stars to rotate continuously is also emitted in the form of gravitational waves.
Thus, the explanation of the failure in Parkes telescope research is that we do not (or have not) fully understood why the swirling black hole produces gravitational waves.
There are several possibilities why the black holes are spinning each other, but do not cause ripples in space-time as much as we think.
Recent observations show that every galaxy, including our own Milky Way, is a port of supermassive black holes at the very core. For reasons still unclear, the mass of black holes is directly related to the mass of nearby galaxies where we have been able to make these measurements, at least so.
Another possibility, when the universe was young, the condition of two black holes rotating and approaching it had not yet occurred. The shape of the black hole is still smaller than what happened today. If so, their contribution to cumulative ripples in spacetime attempting to be 'taken' would be smaller as well-perhaps too small to be detected by Parkes.
Alternatively, early galaxies tend to be richer in gas. This gas will act like a syrup, slow down the black hole occurs. Instead of spinning 'dancing' to their fellow, the black hole couple "threw" at each other faster and created a sudden explosion. Finally, the resulting gravity waves are less.
All these possibilities continue to provide an option for researchers to investigate. Direct gravitational wave measurements will certainly be more than a confirmation of Einstein's general theory of relativity. In addition, it will also be the first time astronomers look to the universe something other than light. All telescopes, regardless of their size and sophistication, use light waves (be they wavelengths of varying radio waves, visible light, or shortwave X-rays).
The observation of gravitational waves will be the beginning of a new era of astronomy. Mankind will be able to find out more about gravity and to see new things.
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