Recently, scientists observed the merger of giant blackholes’ billions of light-years away from the Earth. What is the significance of this observation?
- ‘Higgs boson particles’ were detected
- ‘Gravitational waves’ were detected
- Possibility of intergalactic space travel through ‘wormhole’ was confirmed
- It enabled the scientists to understand ‘singularity’.
Explanation
Option (b) is correct
- The observation of the merger of giant black holes billions of light-years away led to the detection of gravitational waves. In 2015, The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), USA, physically sensed the distortions in spacetime caused by passing gravitational waves generated by two colliding black holes nearly 1.3 billion light-years away.
Option (a) is incorrect
- Peter Higgs and five other theorists proposed the Higgs boson in 1964 to explain why certain particles have mass. Scientists confirmed its existence in 2012 through the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland. This discovery led to the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics being awarded to Higgs and Englert.
Option (c) is incorrect
- Wormholes are a theoretical concept in physics, it can act as a bridge or a shortcut between two points in curved spacetime which are well separated in practical terms to the inhabitants of the universe. The existence of wormholes has been predicted by Ludwig Flamm, in 1916, soon after Einstein proposed his General Theory of Relativity.
Option (d) is incorrect
- A singularity (gravitational singularity or (spacetime singularity) is a condition in which gravity is so intense that spacetime ceases to exist and our laws of physics become invalid. Singularities were first predicated as a result of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, which resulted in the theoretical existence of black holes. In essence, the theory also predicted that any star reaching beyond a certain point in its mass (aka. the Schwarzschild Radius) would exert a gravitational force so intense that it would collapse.
- At this point, nothing would be capable of escaping its surface, including light. This phenomenon is known as the Chandrasekhar Limit, named after the Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who proposed it in 1930.
