Einstein proven right about space-time: UI expert explains significance

IOWA CITY - The monumental space-time discovery announced Thursday will change the way scientists look at the universe, according to a University of Iowa expert.

Scientists for decades have been trying to detect the gravitational waves that Albert Einstein predicted in his 1916 'The Theory of General Relativity” as ripples in the fabric of space and time, produced by massive, accelerating bodies like black holes orbiting each other, according to the National Science Foundation. Scientists finally detected those waves at a pair of ground-based observatories in Washington state and Louisiana.

'It's a big deal,” said UI astronomy professor Phillip Kaaret, who is recognized internationally for his study of X-ray binaries, or stellar systems containing both a black hole and a normal star. 'It really does confirm this prediction of Einstein's theory of gravity, and it opens up a whole new way to look at the universe.”

Before the discovery, Kaaret said, the vast majority of observations by scientists involved some form of light - either visible light, radio waves or X-rays. 'But this is the first time you can see just the gravity of objects directly, without anything else,” he said.

The discovery not only gives scientists a new way of looking at aspects of the universe they've researched for years, Kaaret said, it could shed light - so to speak - on things previously unseen and even unknown.

'This is the first time we have seen a pair of black holes in a binary system,” he said. 'And there might be other things we never even imagined.”

These waves will be particularly useful for studying black holes and other dark objects because they'll give scientists a bright beacon to search for even when objects don't emit light.

Mapping the abundance of black holes and frequency of their mergers could get a lot easier. And since they pass through matter without interacting with it, gravitational waves would come to Earth carrying undistorted information about their origin. They could improve methods for estimating the distances to other galaxies.

When the ground-based observatory analysis detects another gravitational wave event, it will notify the research community and tell scientists where to point their telescopes.

Kaaret is a member of the 'Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System,” which helps search for gamma-ray emissions.

'So we will be following up on events and identifying where they are coming from and what galaxy created them,” Kaaret said.

In addition to the implications the discovery could have for research, Kaaret said, it's simply 'fascinating” and shows 'how exotic the universe really is.”

'A couple of the guys on that stage probably will be getting a Nobel Prize,” he said.

The Washington Post contributed to this report.