Fifty-five years after Albert Einstein’s death, physicists will be testing something he scribed in his theory of general relativity report. Three spacecraft flying 4.8 million kilometres apart will fire lasers at each other, overseen by Nasa and the European Space Agency.
It sounds bonkers (and like a terrible waste of money), but once and for all we’ll discover if gravitational waves are actually possible. The laser beams won’t harm the spacecraft, which will be carrying floating cubes of gold platinum, instead they’ll be used to measure the changes. It’s said to be the largest scientific apparatus to ever be built – and sounds like one of the more expensive, too.
A Glasgow University professor by the name of Jim Hough told the Telegraph that gravitational waves “are produced when massive objects like black holes or collapsed stars accelerate through space, perhaps because they being pulled towards another object with greater gravitational pull like a massive black hole.”
It’s apparently the last part of Einstein’s theory of general relativity to be tested, but hasn’t been possible yet due to the tricky nature of detecting them. Why bother with all this time and expense? Apparently once we learn more about gravitational waves, we learn more about space and the universe around us – giving us insight into collapsed stars’ matter and black holes.
Unfortunately we’ve got a good number of years ahead of us before the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (or LISA as it’s known) is able to proceed, with 2020 being the year we unlock the last piece of Einstein’s puzzle. [LISA via The Telegraph]
Sam Brady
Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 10:40 AMDental Plan!
I don’t know an awful lot about this, but from memory, they have some stations set up on earth to detect gravity waves, involving ridiculously long corridors (several km/miles long) which have to be cut into the earth in their centres to account for the curvature of the earth and ensure they’re straight. I may or may not have confused that with he LHC. I know they’re there to detect gravity waves specifically though, as opposed to relativistic effects on time or the gravitational constant, which I thought might have been what this was for originally. Detecting and understanding gravity waves is pretty damn important.
Milly
Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 4:58 PMYou’re right, there are a few on Earth. I’ve been to one – it’s connected to the Gingin Gravity Discovery Centre, some drive out of Perth. I didn’t see the apparatus because it was running, but I had a video tour, and it’s pretty amazing. They have to use a really long laser because the theory is that gravity waves distort time, so if one passes through the laser there will be a small distortion that they can detect.
Rod
Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 12:37 PMBut how are the frikkin’ sharks meant to breathe out there?
Shane
Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 1:08 PMSounds like a really good excuse to shoot lasers at stuff!!
Asteroids anybody??