Gravitational-Wave Scientists LIGO Wins Top Magazine Award
This year is an excellent time for scientists who are associated with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Last February and June, the researchers from Handford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana announced their latest discovery about the gravitational waves which was a result of two black holes that collides 1.3 billion light years from the Earth.
The series of developments brought LIGO into fame, and the collaboration has earned several accolades. That accolade includes $3 million awards which were given to the researchers by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.
According to Space, the Journal Nature and the Magazine Physics World which was published by the London-based Institute of Physics has named the recent gravitation wave discovery as the "Breakthrough of the Year."
The significance of the discovery has been acknowledged but this time in the journal Science. Now, one of the world's top scientific magazines has given its award to the highest yearly honor to an experiment in searching for ripples in the fabric of the universe.
With the collaboration of scientists who created and operate the LIGO, the science magazine has bestowed its 2016 Breakthrough of the Year Award. The award is one of the much recognition that the collaboration and its scientists have won.
"The achievement fulfilled a 100-year-old prediction, opened up a potential new branch of astronomy, and was a stunning technological accomplishment," the journal said in a statement.
According to LIGO website, the gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein first in 1915. It almost took a century for him to procure the first-ever direct detection of the cosmic phenomena. Einstein also discovered that space and time are not separate but rather make a single and universal fabric that everything moves through.
The massive objects moving through space-time could even create ripples and LIGO has detected these two separate signals of such waves. These ripples came from a pair of black holes that are circling each other and merging into a single entity.
The two other magazines have given accolades to LIGO, and it eventually earned a $3 million Special Prize in Fundamental Physics from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.
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