Two Pakistanis were members of the team of scientists and engineers that discovered gravitational waves in the fabric of space and time, confirming Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and heralding new era of uncovering mysteries of cosmos.

Imran Khan from Quetta

Mr Imran Khan a PHD scholar in Italy and a Graduate of FAST Peshawar is the 2nd Pakistani that worked with a team of Scientist and Engineers at LIGO that recorded Gravitational Waves First time in history of Mankind.

Nergis Mavalvala, 47, who was born in Karachi and started studying gravitational waves during her graduation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The Pakistani-American professor is one of the leading scientists to have persistently pursued the project in the United States.

The other Pakistani is Imran Khan, a 25-year-old scientist, who is from Quetta, Balochistan, and is a PhD candidate at Italy’s Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI), one of the institutions involved in the research.While Dr. Nergis Mavalvala, Professor of Astrophysics, is already a well-known figure, young Imran Khan received media spotlight only on Monday.

The news of two Pakistani scientists being part of the momentous discovery of gravitational waves has been sweeping across Pakistani airwaves and newspapers since last Thursday, with messages of felicitation emanating from top leadership and jubilation in the scientific community.

In the United States, Pakistani-Americans welcomed the news that two scientists of Pakistani origin contribute to the tremendous scientific advancement.

The breakthrough is a milestone for American and world scientists, after years of investment and commitment to the LIGO project, one of the largest funded missions by the National Science Foundation. Britain’s Science and Technology Facilities Council, Germany’s Max Planck Society and Australian Research Council have also contributed to the mammoth LIGO project.

Announced last week, the epoch-making discovery of gravitational waves – already hailed as discovery of the century – means the scientists have detected gravitational waves reaching earth. A study of the waves will reveal about their “dramatic” origins and about the nature of gravity that cannot otherwise be obtained.

“Physicists have concluded that the detected gravitational waves were produced during the final fraction of a second of the merger of two black holes to produce a single, more massive spinning black hole. This collision of two black holes had been predicted but never observed,” a statement by Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) said.

According to LIGO, the gravitational waves were detected on September 14, 2015 at 5:51 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (09:51 UTC) by both of the twin LIGO detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, USA.

“This is an exciting and unforgettable moment: I have spent 35 years of my life in this research”, GSSI’s director Eugenio Coccia said in a statement.

“Detecting gravitational waves and proving the existence of black holes all in once is wonderful. Humanity has now a new sense: from now on we will not only see the cosmos, but also listen to its vibrations, its music.”

According to the Institute’s website in all the LIGO endeavor involved 1004 researchers belonging to 133 scientific institutions all over the world.

Meanwhile, academics, scientists and engineers and students in Pakistan have embraced the news as a morale booster for the nation, grappling with security challenges.

In the past, Pakistan produced some of the greatest names in the field of physics including Nobel Laureate Dr. Abdul Salam. In America, Dr. Ayub Ommaya invented the Ommaya Reservoir, which is used to treat brain tumors.

Born to a Parsi family in Karachi, Mavlavala got her early education in the mega port city, and since her school days, she has been an avid learner, researcher, scientist and teacher. She came to the United States as teenager.

According to her MIT research page, Prof. Mavlavala’s work focuses on making instruments called interferometers that are “sensitive enough to detect gravitational waves.”

“So why should we look for these faint and elusive gravitational waves? Directly detecting gravitational waves will open a new window to further our understanding of Universe. Gravitational waves will tell us about Black Holes that gobble up light, but radiate gravitational waves, and about the earliest moments after the Big Bang, when light could not escape the birth throes of the Universe,” she tells readers of her page, provoking curiosity into the research.

In an article, four years ago, Science magazine, noted that Mavalvala has passed her “infectious enthusiasm” for her work to many students. According to the magazine Mavalvala saw herself a product of good mentoring.

“From the chemistry teacher in Pakistan who let her play with reagents in the lab after school to the head of the physics department at MIT, who supported her work when she joined the faculty in 2002, she has encountered several encouraging people on her journey,” writer Vijaysree Vankatraman remarked in a comprehensive article.

The other Pakistani, Imran Khan is a graduate of National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Peshawar campus. The NUCES was established by Foundation for Advancement of Science and Technology, and is considered a premier institution.

Khan is researching at Italian Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI), which contributed to LIGO project with 8 coauthors, six of which are young researchers from Italy, China, India and Pakistan.

“It was great to get selected among hundreds of applicants for the Marie Curie initial training network program ‘GraWIToN’ to become part of the European team involved with the discovery of gravitational waves,” Imran Khan told Pakistani Dawn newspaper, describing his mother as the inspiration behind his work.

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A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of moving ripples in space and time.

Physicists have announced the discovery of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were first anticipated by Albert Einstein a century ago.
“We have detected gravitational waves. We did it,” said David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo), at a press conference in Washington.

The announcement is the climax of a century of speculation, 50 years of trial and error, and 25 years perfecting a set of instruments so sensitive they could identify a distortion in spacetime a thousandth the diameter of one atomic nucleus across a 4km strip of laserbeam and mirror.

The phenomenon detected was the collision of two black holes. Using the world’s most sophisticated detector, the scientists listened for 20 thousandths of a second as the two giant black holes, one 35 times the mass of the sun, the other slightly smaller, circled around each other.

At the beginning of the signal, their calculations told them how stars perish: the two objects had begun by circling each other 30 times a second. By the end of the 20 millisecond snatch of data, the two had accelerated to 250 times a second before the final collision and a dark, violent merger.

The observation signals the opening of a new window on to the universe.

Why discovering gravitational waves changes everything

“This is transformational,” said Prof Alberto Vecchio, of the University of Birmingham, and one of the researchers at Ligo. “We have observed the universe through light so far. But we can only see part of what happens in the universe. Gravitational waves carry completely different information about phenomena in the universe. So we have opened a new way of listening to a broadcasting channel which will allow us to discover phenomena we have never seen before,” he said.
“This observation is truly incredible science and marks three milestones for physics: the direct detection of gravitational waves, the first detection of a binary black hole, and the most convincing evidence to date that nature’s black holes are the objects predicted by Einstein’s theory.”

The scientists detected their cataclysmic event using an instrument so sensitive it could detect a change in the distance between the solar system and the nearest star four light years away to the thickness of a human hair.

And they did so within weeks of turning on their new, upgraded instrument: it took just 20 milliseconds to catch the merger of two black holes, at a distance of 1.3 billion light years, somewhere beyond the Large Magellanic Cloud in the southern hemisphere sky, but it then took months of meticulous checking of the signal against all the complex computer simulations of black hole collision to make sure the evidence matched the theoretical template.

The detector was switched off in January for a further upgrade: astronomers still have to decipher months of material collected in the interval. But – given half a century of frustration in the search for gravitational waves – what they found exceeded expectation: suddenly, in the mutual collapse of two black holes, they could eavesdrop on the violence of the universe.

Prof B S Sathyaprakash, from Cardiff University’s school of physics and astronomy, said: “The shock would have released more energy than the light from all the stars in the universe for that brief instant. The fusion of two black holes which created this event had been predicted but never observed.”

The finding completed the scientific arc of prediction, discovery and confirmation: first they calculated what they should be able to detect, then decided what the evidence should look like, and then devised the experiment that clinched the matter. Which is why on Thursday scientists around the world were able to hail the announcement as yet another confirmation of their “standard model” of the cosmos, and the beginning of a new era of discovery.

Astronomers have already exploited visible light, the infrared and ultraviolet, radio waves, x-rays and even gamma-rays in their attempt to understand the mechanics of stars, the evolution of the galaxies and the expansion of the universe from an initial big bang 13.8bn years ago.

Unequivocal
Thursday’s announcement was the unequivocal first detection ever of gravity waves. The hope is that gravity wave astronomy could start to answer questions not just about the life of stars but their deaths as well: death by collision, death in a black hole, death in some rare stellar catastrophe so fierce that, for a few thousandths of a second, the blast is the brightest thing in the universe.
Even before the Ligo detectors in two US states reopened for business late last year, researchers were confident that a detection would follow swiftly. The announcement came after months of speculation, and decades of theoretical and practical work by an international network of more than a thousand scientists and engineers in Britain, Europe, the US and around the world.

Professor Kip Thorne, of the California Institute of Technology, and one of the founding fathers of Ligo, said that until now, astronomers had looked at the universe as if on a calm sea. All of that had changed.

“The colliding black holes that produced these gravitational waves created a violent storm in the fabric of space and time, a storm in which time speeded up and slowed down, and speeded up again, a storm in which the shape of space was bent in this way and that way,” he said.

Prof Neil Turok, director the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics at Waterloo in Canada, and a former research colleague of Prof Stephen Hawking, called the discovery “the real deal, one of those breakthrough moments in science”.
Ligio co-founder Rainer Weiss, left, and Kip Thorne, right, hug on stage during a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington.

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Ligo co-founder Rainer Weiss, left, and Kip Thorne, right, hug on stage during a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington. Photograph: Andrew Harnik/AP

Not only had the detector picked up the collision of two enormous black holes across a distance of almost a billion light years of space, it recorded the distinctive “chirp” as the two spiralled towards each other.

The discovery, he said, completes a scientific arc of wonder that began 200 years ago, when the great British scientist Michael Faraday began to puzzle about how action was transmitted across the distance of space; how the sun pulled the Earth around. If the sun moved 10 yards, very suddenly, would the Earth feel the difference?

He reasoned that something must cross space to transmit the force of gravity. Faraday’s reasoning inspired the great British mathematician James Clerk Maxwell to think about how an electric force travelled, and arrive at an understanding of light and a prediction of radio waves.

“Einstein, when he came to write down his theory of gravity, his two heroes were Faraday and Maxwell,” said Turok. “He tried to write down laws of the gravitational field and he wasn’t in the least surprised to discover that his predictions had waves, gravitational waves.”
The Ligo discovery signals a new era in astronomy, he said.

“Just think of radio waves, when radio waves were discovered we learned to communicate with them. Mobile communication is entirely reliant on radio waves. For astronomy, radio observations have probably told us more than anything else about the structure of the universe. Now we have gravitational waves we are going to have a whole new picture of the universe, of the stuff that doesn’t emit light – dark matter, black holes,” he said.

“For me the most exciting thing is we will literally be able to see the big bang. Using electromagnetic waves we cannot see further back than 400,000 years after the big bang. The early universe was opaque to light. It is not opaque to gravitational waves. It is completely transparent.

“So literally, by gathering gravitational waves we will be able to see exactly what happened at the initial singularity. The most weird and wonderful prediction of Einstein’s theory was that everything came out of a single event: the big bang singularity. And we will be able to see what happened.”

• The headline to this article was amended on 12 February 2016. An earlier version said the discovery was a breakthrough after two centuries of expectation. This has been corrected.
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Topics
Gravity
Physics
Space
Astronomy
Albert Einstein

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