China has launched a state of the art Satellite, first ever by any Nation in the history.
It has launched a satellite observatory capable of detecting gravitational waves like never before, the first such device in use by any nation.
Notably, the new satellite carries hyper-sensitive equipment and aims to track gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time traveling at light-speed across the universe.
The ripples, first predicted in theory by physicist Albert Einstein, are produced by a variety of phenomena involving mass moving at very high speeds, including a star exploding in a supernova, two big stars orbiting each other or a collision between two black holes, according to link the US space agency NASA.
However, the waves squeeze and stretch matter as they ripple across the universe – something the Taiji-1 satellite, launched by China on August 31, hopes to detect with better accuracy and subtlety than ever before.
“This is the first step of China’s space-based gravitational wave detection,” Xiangli Bin, vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), told Xinhua link on Friday. “But there is still a long way to go to realize detecting gravitational waves in space. Chinese scientists will continue to contribute Chinese wisdom to the exploration and human progress.”