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| BBC Science News - Artist's conception of White Dwarf pair and Gravity Waves |
...and, actually finding them! D.E. Winget - on of the investigators on the paper - is a professor at UT Austin Astrophysics. It's a small club...we kind of all know each other.
Researchers have spotted visible-light evidence for one of astronomy's most elusive targets - gravitational waves - in the orbit of a pair of dead stars.
Until now, these ripples in space-time, first predicted by Einstein, have only been inferred from radio-wave sources.
But a change in the orbits of two white dwarf stars orbiting one another 3,000 light-years away is further proof of the waves that can literally be seen.
A study to be reported in Astrophysical Journal Letters describes the pair.
Gravitational waves were a significant part of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which viewed space itself as a malleable construct, and the gravity of massive objects as a force that could effectively warp it.
BBC Science News: Gravitational waves spotted from white-dwarf pair
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