Gravitational Waves

The idea of so called gravitational waves originated from the theory of general relativity which stated that

gravity is a result of curvature of space-time and massive objects can actually bend or distort space-time resulting in what we know a gravitational force.

How does gravitational waves form?

consider a charged particle in space as we disturb the position the that particle either by moving it constantly or making it vibrate, we get Electromagnetic radiation out of it because of the disturbances that we make in the Electromagnetic field.

Similarly, when we move a mass in space we should get gravitational waves due to the disturbances we make in the gravitational field around it.The only problem with gravitational waves is that, its a really weak set of waves the gets reduced rapidly as it gets away from the mass it originated from.

But we could detect gravitational waves by observing a pair of binary stars spirally towards each other. it was found that the decay in orbital period of these stars should be due to the loss of energy due to emission of gravitational waves

But is there any other way of detecting gravitational waves?

Scientists know that after the big bang the inflation occurred and if gravitational waves existed then (it should have) the we could see the effect of those waves on the matter at that time by observing the cosmic microwave background radiation from that period. Scientist say that gravitational waves should have affected the light coming from that period of time.

Finally we did get an image from that period of the polarized light (shown below) which was detected by BICEP 2 back in March 2014.

But this was later ruled out and confirmed to be the result of cosmic dust.

So we don’t have a proof yet to confirm the existence of gravitational waves but that doesn’t stop scientists from working hard to prove its existence and it may occur soon.

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