Before 2016, a nobel prize had already been rewarded for an observation that was consistent with, and seemed to confirm, the existence of gravitational waves. In 1974, Russell Hulse and Joesph Taylor discovered a very compact binary system of objects at a distance of 21,000 light years, consisting of two neutron stars orbiting one another. One of the bodies was also a pulsar, meaning that the radiation beams emitted from its poles periodically point toward Earth as it rotates. Since the rotation rate of a neutron star changes only very slowly over time, pulsars are fairly precise clocks. However, Hulse and Taylor detected that the pulses did not reach Earth precisely on time, but varied slightly from the expected arrival time. They were sometimes sooner, sometimes later in a regular pattern, indicating that the pulsar in question was in fact part of a binary system.
The above diagram depicts the binary system consisting of pulsar B1913+16 and its companion, another neutron star. No radiation from the companion has been observed on Earth, indicating that its poles oriented away from us. However, its presence can be inferred from the fact that the pulsar moves farther and closer to Earth in a short, regular period, indicating an orbit. The difference in arrival times is about 3 seconds, indicating that the orbit is about 3 light-seconds across. Further, the orbital period is 7.75 hours.
This discovery provided an excellent opportunity to confirm the predictions of general relativity: such a compact system with rapidly orbiting masses would radiate fairly large quantities of gravitational radiation. However, direct detection was well beyond 1970's technology. Instead, Taylor observed the pulsar system over a number of decades, and found the following:
Since the discovery of the pulsar, its orbital period had been decreasing very slowly, though steadily and measurably, by about 35 seconds over a timespan of 30 years. This is very little relative to the total period of 7.75 hours, but the data matched the predictions of general relativity almost precisely: as energy was lost to gravitational waves, the neutron stars gradually spiral inward toward one other as their orbits becoming shorter and shorter. This remarkable confirmation of a prediction of relativity won Hulse and Taylor the Noble Prize in physics in 1993.
And there the matter sat. Though detectors grew more and more advanced, no direct detections of gravitational waves were made for over 20 years. This all changed in 2015.
On September 14, 2015, at 09:50:45 UTC, shortly after LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) resumed activity following an upgrade, the two detectors in Washington State and Louisiana picked up a transient gravitational wave signal, the first ever observed by humankind. The announcement of the discovery was made several months later, on February 11, 2016.
The above image shows the signals recorded at Hanford, Washington (left) and Livingston, Louisiana (right). The signals are also superimposed on the right to demonstrate their similarity. The horizontal axis is time, measured relative to 09:50:45 UTC on that day. The reader may notice that the event was distinguishable from the surrounding noise in the detector for only about 0.05 seconds (the third row charts the residual noise after the theoretical waveform in the second row is subtracted out). The final row shows the rapid increase in gravitational wave amplitude during the event and the subsequent silence. The vertical dimension in the first several rows is the relative strain on the detectors, or the amount by which the different arms of LIGO were stretched or compressed by the ripples in spacetime. The scale for these axes measures strain by parts in 10-21. This corresponds to extraordinarily minute changes in length: the 4 kilometer arms of the LIGO detector changed by only about 10-18 meters, only about one thousandth the diameter of a proton!
This image shows the region in the sky from which the signals likely originated. The colors indicate the confidence that the source lay within the indicated region: purple is the 90% confidence region and yellow the 50% confidence region. The uncertainty arises from the fact that there were two detectors, and not the three required for a full triangulation.
In addition to the location of the source, the analysis of the waveform yields more. The distance of the system was roughly 1.2 billion light-years, meaning that the merger that we are just now observing occurred over a billion years ago. The two black holes had respective masses of about 36 and 29 solar masses, while the final black hole after the merger weighed in at 62 solar masses. This corresponds to a loss of about 3 solar masses, which was all converted into energy released as gravitational waves as the holes merged. The magnitude of this cataclysm can scarcely be overstated: at its peak, the rate of energy release was an estimated 3.6x1049 W, greater than the radiation emitted from all stars in the observable universe combined!
In addition to being a resounding confirmation of general relativity, the observation was the first truly direct detection of black holes: the fact that such massive objects came within hundreds of kilometers of one another indicates that they had extremely high densities, densities only possible in black holes. But while significant, cosmologists were already nearly certain that both gravitational waves and black holes existed. However, this discovery marks the opening of a brand new field of astronomy. Gravitational waves, which pass unimpeded through nearly anything over nearly any distance, allow us to "hear" cosmic events that we could not have detected before. In theory, these waves could allow us to observe the earliest stages of the universe, before it became transparent to electromagnetic radiation. In 2016, 100 years after Einstein predicted gravitational waves, we took the first step towards seeing the universe in a new way.
Sources: http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?1989ApJ...345..434T&data_type=PDF_HIGH&whole_paper=YES&type=PRINTER&filetype=.pdf, https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102, http://resources.edb.gov.hk/physics/articlePic/InterestingTopics/BinaryStars_pic04E.gif
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