Have Physicists Finally Detected Gravitational Waves?
The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has news so big it announced that it would announce something. The press conference will stream live tomorrow at noon, but cosmologists everywhere are gossiping about what that news could be. The leading theory: Scientists have detected gravitational waves, in what would be a landmark discovery for the field of physics.
Gravitational waves are the last chunk of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity that was predicted but not yet observed. If gravitational waves have been observed, it most likely was done by the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (Bicep) telescope at the south pole. It stared at the cosmic microwave background radiation from 2003 to 2008, but it takes a long time to process and analyze the data when looking for a faint signal in a lot of noise.