Gravitational waves are teaching scientists the 'native language' of black holes
The second-ever detection of ripples in the fabric of space, announced Wednesday, is a signal to the scientific community that the era of gravitational wave astronomy is wide open.
"It confirms - it super-confirms - that these events are not flukes," Vicky Kalogera, an astrophysicist and collaborator with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) experiment, told Tech Insider. "They're happening in nature and we can detect them every few months."
Kalogera and about 1,000 other scientists think that both known signals came from colliding black holes.
Until we recorded their gravitational waves, all evidence of black holes was indirect. "The regular matter in the vicinity of the black hole can emit radiation that's influenced by the black hole," astrophysicist and LIGO collaborator Vicky Kalogera told Tech Insider, "but it's not coming from the black hole itself."
But LIGO is routing around the limits of our knowledge.
Imre Bartos, another scientist working with LIGO, told Tech Insider that those emissions "screamed for help" as they were getting sucked into the black hole.
Instead of the radiation "screams" from planets, stars, and clouds of cosmic gas getting sucked into the black hole, we can finally detect something black holes emit themselves.
"We're finally now understanding their native language," Kalogera said. "The natural language of black holes is gravitational waves, so for the first time, we've been able to understand their languages and understand what they're telling us, and get their messages," Kalogera said.
Those "messages" will tell us more about the evolution of black holes, from the collapse of stars that make them to their violent collisions with each other.
Bartos said LIGO will help us "peek into the heart of these phenomena." What's more, he added, these crashes are make some of the loudest noises in the galaxy.
"Just like you're in a room and you're talking to somebody," he said. "You can clearly hear what the person is telling you, but you can also hear the murmur." That "murmur" is the echo of all the events releasing gravitational waves, possibly as far back as the birth of the universe.
LIGO is offline at the moment, but its second run later in 2016 should reveal even more information about the universe as we listen to more phenomena that speak the language of gravity.