Einstein was right: Boffins find gravitational waves that bend TIME and SPACE

SCIENTISTS have discovered gravitational waves that bend TIME and SPACE, 100 years after Albert Einstein predicted they exist. The discovery could change our understanding of the universe forever and has been hailed as being as significant as when boffins worked out the structure of DNA.

The announcement comes 101 years after Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity which suggested that huge bodies in space, like planets or black holes, have so much mass that they actually bend space and time.

The effects of gravitational waves were demonstrated in the sci-fi film Interstellar when the crew visited a planet which fell within the gravitational pull of a massive black hole, so time slowed down massively.
Crew members barely aged on the planet because the gravitational waves had slowed down time. But the people who stayed on the spaceship were decades older when the others returned to the ship.
Einstein predicted if two massive bodies came together it would create a huge ripple in space time and so should be detectable on Earth. And scientists at Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in Washington, USA, announced they had done just that.

The ripple they have detected is believed to be caused by two black holes colliding. This proves Einstein’s theory and is the first proof black holes actually exist.

Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees said: "This detection is one of the great discoveries of the decade, up there with the detection of the Higgs particle, which caused huge razzmatazz two years ago.
"Gravitational waves, vibrations in the fabric of space itself, are a crucial and distinctive consequence of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

"This theory tells us that the force of gravity is best understood as a ‘warping’ of space itself. And when gravitating objects move, they generate a ‘ripple’ in space itself.

“When such a ripple passes the Earth, our local space is alternately stretched and compressed, rather as, when a stone is thrown into a pond."