One thing physics has taught us is that events at the smallest possible scales can have consequences of cosmic proportions. And, in turn, studying some of the universeââ¬â¢s most spectacular astrophysical phenomenon can reveal a lot about physics at its most elementary level.
The latest example of this has been proposed by a team of researchers in Europe ââ¬â they say that studying the contours of burned-out remnants of stars thousands of light years away could provide concrete evidence for two of the most sought-after phenomena in fundamental physics.
The first phenomenon, gravitational waves, was predicted by Einsteinââ¬â¢s theory of general relativity, which explained the force of gravity as a curvature in spacetime induced by mass. Einsteinââ¬â¢s theory is typically illustrated by depicting spacetime as if it resembled a rubber sheet, which a heavy object (such as a star or planet) bends down into a dimple, into which other objects can roll. In this analogy, a disturbance of the heavy mass can produce a ripple in the sheet, radiating outwards like a splash in a pond. This is a gravitational wave, which carries away some energy from the source.
To create a ripple of any significant size, the disturbance has to be really big ââ¬â for example, two stars colliding. Rather less dramatically, two star-like objects orbiting one another very fast and close are predicted to radiate energy as gravitational waves, so that they gradually lose energy and spiral in towards one another. This effect has been observed before: several times in so-called binary pulsars, and just recently in a binary white-dwarf system 3,000 light years away.
