It’s taken centuries for our understanding of gravity to evolve to where it is today, culminating in the discovery of gravitational waves, as predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago.
Massive bodies can send ripples through space time in the form of gravitational waves.
NASA
The long awaited discovery of gravitational waves has sent ripples through the scientific world. Here top experts respond to the historic announcement.
Extra, extra! The embargo’s lifted, read all about it.
Newspapers image via www.shutterstock.com.
It takes something as stupendous as the merger between two black holes to generate detectable gravitational waves. Here’s how such incredible cosmic objects form.
Computer simulation of two merging black holes producing gravitational waves.
Werner Benger.
It is the physics discovery of the century – even bigger than the Higgs Boson. Here’s how it happened and what it means, by a key member of one of the lead teams
The 4km long arms of the LIGO experiment at Hanford.
LIGO lab: www.ligo.caltech.edu
The next decade will be an exciting one for Australian astronomy, as we probe the heavens for answers to age old questions.
New data reveals no evidence of gravitational waves in the early universe, as observed by the BICEP2 radio telescope (pictured) near the South Pole.
teffen Richter, Harvard University
One of this century’s greatest potential discoveries concerning the origins of the universe has now fallen to galactic dust. That’s according to a new joint-analysis of all the existing data – including…
Planck telescope and the Cosmic microwave background.
ESA and Planck
In March, scientists working on the BICEP2 experiment, a microwave telescope based at the South Pole, announced that they had seen ‘gravity waves’ from the early universe, created just after the Big Bang…
There’s a lot of dust between us and the edge of the universe.
H Raab/Flickr
It’s almost three months since a team of scientists announced it had detected polarised light from the afterglow of the Big Bang. But questions are still being asked about whether cosmic dust may have…
BICEP2 is on the roof of the building on the left.
Rashmi Sudiwala
The astronomical instrument BICEP2 was deployed at the South Pole in 2009 to look for evidence that would support the theory of inflation, which tries to explain how the universe looked a trillionth of…