WSU researchers make waves
A still of two colliding black holes from computer simulation created by Simulating Extreme Spacetimes Project.
February 12, 2016
Members of the scientific community celebrated today after one of the year’s greatest discoveries: the detection of gravitational waves rippling through the fabric of “space-time.” The cheers were especially loud at WSU.
“We have detected gravitational waves. We did it,” said David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), at a news conference in Washington D.C. announcing the discovery.
With one of the two LIGO observatories in Hanford, Wash., several scientists at WSU contributed to this discovery, which is being heralded an unprecedented new dynamic to the cosmos. WSU participants Sukanta Bose, postdoctoral researcher Nairwita Mazumder, graduate students Bernard Hall and Ryan Magee, all physicists; and astrophysicists Fred Raab and Greg Mendell worked at the LIGO Hanford facility and contributed to the discovery.
“In addition to dramatically confirming Einstein’s general theory of relativity, this marks the beginning of a new era in astrophysics,” WSU physics and astronomy chair Matt McCluskey told WSU News.
“We now have a working gravitational wave observatory, and WSU is in on the ground floor,” he said.
First described by Albert Einstein in 1915, scientists have worked to prove his theory for decades, using instruments in Louisiana and Washington state so sensitive an airplane flying overhead could disrupt the experiment, according to the Scientific American website.
LIGO first began monitoring in 2002 and went without any detection of ripples in space-time for eight years before it was shut down, according to an article in Scientific American. Scientists then upgraded the detector, making it even more sensitive, with an official start date of Sept. 18, 2015.
But even before the experiment officially began again, a signal was detected with the new equipment on Sept. 14, registering at the LIGO detector in Louisiana seven milliseconds before the LIGO detector in Hanford received the same signal, the Scientific American reported.
The gravitational waves were detected by both of the LIGO detectors in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Wash. on Sept. 14, at 5:51 a.m. EST, according to a WSU News report.
It lasted less than one second. Physicists that operate both LIGO detectors have concluded that the gravitational waves were a result of two massive spinning black holes colliding and merging into a single black hole 1.3 billion years ago, which they stated at the news conference Thursday.
The wave was produced during the final fraction of a second during that merge, somewhere beyond the Large Magellanic Cloud in the Southern Hemisphere sky, according to the announcement in Washington D.C.
To many outside the scientific community, this information registers about as much as these waves did in September. However, scientists involved argue this discovery is the strongest evidence yet for the existence of black holes, which have been observed but not yet scientifically proven, according to the Scientific American.
“I never expected this in my lifetime, and I’m really happy for the people involved in this whole venture, and mainly for the people who have spent all their life working on this, they really deserve this” Mazumder said.
Bose is set to speak about this discovery at 4 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 16, in Webster, Room 17.
Reporting by Zachary Anders