Today (Feb. 11) we're expecting scientists to announce a discovery that will change physics as we know it.
Physicists may have finally detected ripples in the fabric of spacetime. These ripples are called gravitational waves and they emanate from calamitous cosmic events like when a star explodes or when two black holes collide.
Albert Einstein first predicted their existence 100 years ago, and physicists have been hunting for them ever since. Now, after weeks of whispers and rumors that scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) have detected the waves out in space, we'll know for sure.
LIGO will make the announcement at 10:30 a.m. ET.
But here's how we'd know if LIGO really detected gravitational waves or not, according to an animation created by the lab.
How to detect gravitational waves
LIGO is a huge L-shaped detector that's been hunting gravitational waves since 2002. It relies on a laser to search for them.
The instrument shoots out a laser beam which gets split in two and sent down two 2.5-mile long tubes.
The beams both bounce off mirrors and converge back near the beam splitter. The light waves return at equal length, and line up in such a way that they cancel each other out.
As a result, the light detector part of the instrument doesn't see any light.
But should a gravitational wave come through, it would warp spacetime, and actually make one tube longer and the other shorter. This rhythmic stretching and squeezing would continue until the wave passes.
When this kind of interference happens, the two waves aren't equal lengths when they return, so they don't line up as neatly and no longer cancel each other out.
That means the detector would actually record some flashes of light. So a physicist measuring those changes in brightness would actually be measuring and observing gravitational waves.
Either way, we'll find out this morning.
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