What is gravitational wave?

It took us 100 years to confirm the existence of gravitational waves - just as the prophecy of genius Albert Einstein.

On the morning of February 12, 2016 (Vietnamese time), scientists have officially confirmed the discovery of gravitational waves - which is considered to be the discovery of the century of astrophysics.

Experts even argue that this discovery deserves a Nobel Prize in Physics for bringing people to a new horizon, a completely different way to study the universe.

Gravitational waves will bend the surrounding space-time region. Scientists have noticed this distortion by technology from the Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) by laser interferometry when the wave "hits" the Earth.

But you know, finding gravitational waves is extremely difficult, so it can be said to be an extraordinary discovery. And let's try to see what we need to know about this extraordinary discovery.

Gravitational waves are a concept given by genius Albert Einstein since 1915. He has argued that time and space may be bent by gravitational waves, and scientists also recognize this. However, it was not until 100 years later that mankind had enough technology to officially confirm his theory.

Scientists have suspected that the merging of two giant black holes will release a huge mass of energy in the form of gravitational waves in the last few minutes. This energy source is even larger than the energy of a burning star for billions of years.

Gravitational waves will cause space-time to shrink and expand , but on a very small scale. Therefore we need the technology of LIGO in the picture below, with the ability to determine distortion smaller than hydrogen atoms up to 1 million times.

This gravitational wave is determined when two cosmic black holes are about to merge. Signals from LIGO show that this "terrible" collision releases a block of energy in the form of gravitational waves more than 50 times the energy of the entire star in this universe.

However, not only does the cosmic black hole have gravitational waves, but any material with orbit around each other can do it.This means that the Earth and the Sun also produce gravitational waves.However, this energy source is 100 billion times smaller than the collision between two black holes, so identifying them is impossible with current technology.

Experts say two black holes collide somewhere in the universe every 15 minutes.This shows that we can observe gravitational waves many times in the future.

Before this discovery, we had no way of knowing when a black hole could be combined. Therefore, it can be said that this finding not only confirmed Einstein's prophecy from more than 100 years ago but also revealed an astronomical phenomenon never known before.