We are not the 1er April:
http://www.telerama.fr/monde/ondes-grav ... 138202.phpIt's still a little sore on the head ...
The Nobel Prize winner for gravitational waves: Einstein was right, we live well in soft calf
Albert Einstein theorized it, international teams of researchers confirmed it, a hundred years later: the gravitational waves, these vibrations of space-time, were detected. These scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics 2017 for this discovery.
Let's forget these stories of elastic fabric or lake surface representing space-time. These are two-dimensional mentions. In reality, we are born, live and die all in calf soft. We, ladybugs, two-euro coins and stars. All stuck in the same elastic jelly that we make tressauter, more or less strong, according to our respective masses. Let's be clear, we do not weigh heavy in the calf soft. Even our Sun is a featherweight. And when a ladybug, a man, a two-euro coin or a sun like ours dies, there's not much going on. But when a residual star of more than 3,3 solar masses collapses on itself for lack of fuel, it ends up in a black hole, which, let us agree, stir much more the soft of calf than the death of a being expensive. And if two black holes begin to dance the jitter in the jelly, then the vibratory waves they send around them, all over the universe, distort space-time considerably. The mou gigote.
"We should be able to capture these gravitational waves, but it will be cotton," said Albert Einstein, in a sustained language, a century or so ago, a year after he laid the theory of general relativity that forever changed the idea that we made space. Before Einstein, space, that is, the emptiness that remains when one removes all matter, was considered a rigid structure. With Einstein, the space becomes this jelly whose elastic structure can be deformed by the material.
Well, dear Albert, it's done! Once again your great theory is confirmed. The LIGO interferometer (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) installed in the United States on two sites located 3000 kilometers apart, one in Louisiana, the other in the state of Washington, observed the 14 last September to 11h51 the dance of two black holes, of respectively 29 and 36 solar masses, located at 1,3 billion light-years, and which eventually merge. The two giants got into the bacon at two-thirds the speed of light. It was the first time we had seen such a stellar cataclysm. The monster resulting from the fusion "weighs" only 62 times the mass of the Sun. The three missing masses were transformed into energy (according to Einstein's law, always him, E = mc2). The energy of gravitational waves, according to the European and American teams of Virgo and LIGO who analyzed the data.
A deformation of fractions of a millionth of a billionth of a millimeter
The LIGO detector consists of two tunnels four kilometers long in which synchronized laser beams circulate. If nothing comes to disturb their progress, they stay in phase. If a gravitational wave deforms the Earth, one arm can stretch, the other shrinks and the two lasers are no longer synchronized. It is this tiny deformation that the researchers have captured. Because the gravitational waves sent by the dance of the two black holes have an extremely small amplitude. On a four-kilometer arm, deformation measures a fraction of a millionth of a billionth of a millimeter.
This major discovery is that of the Higgs boson in particle physics. It may also be worth to its authors the Nobel Prize for Physics in the fall. She establishes (once again) that Einstein was the greatest scientific genius of all time. It also paves the way for a new type of astronomy dedicated to these strange things unobservable in visible light, like the gravitational collapse of a massive star or the dance of black holes. Incidentally, she confirms that the man, the ladybird, the two-euro coin and the sun are born, live and die in calf soft.