CHANNELS

Aerospace

Automotive

Automated & Autonomous Vehicles

Battery & Electrification Technology

Defense

Drone TV

Electronics

Manufacturing & Prototyping

Materials

Medical

Motion Control

RF & Microwave Technology

Robotics & Automation

Sensors & IoT

Test & Measurement

Aerospace
Automotive
Automated & Autonomous Vehicles
Battery & Electrification Technology
Defense
Drone TV
Electronics
Manufacturing & Prototyping
Materials
Medical
Motion Control
RF & Microwave Technology
Robotics & Automation
Sensors & IoT
Test & Measurement
Aerospace & Defense
Search Results

Scientists Who Made First Direct Detection of Gravitational Waves Awarded Nobel Prize

On October 3, 2017, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017  to scientists Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish, and Kip S. Thorne "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and observation of gravitational waves."Almost 100 years ago, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves - ripples in the fabric of space-time that are set off by extremely violent, cosmic cataclysms in the early universe. In September, 2015, for the first time, scientists in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration  directly observed the ripples of gravitational waves in an instrument on Earth. In so doing, they have again dramatically confirmed Einstein's theory of general relativity, and opened up a new way in which to view the universe. According to their calculations, the gravitational wave is the product of a collision between two massive black holes, 1.3 billion light years away - a remarkably extreme event that has not been observed until now. The researchers detected the signal with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). Building on these ground-based efforts, an international group of scientists is working to develop a space-based gravitational wave observatory called the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). Dr. James Ira Thorpe developed instrumentation used on LISA. Read a Tech Briefs 'Who's Who at NASA' with Thorpe.

Topics:
Aerospace Data Acquisition Data Acquisition Detectors Lasers & Laser Systems Measuring Instruments Photonics Sensors Test & Measurement

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:00 LIGO stands for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory. LIGO is really two observatories that work in unison, in tandem. The LIGO interferometer has arms that are about 2 and 1/2 miles long, 4 kilometers. We have a laser. The laser produces the purest light you can possibly make. It produces light that's so coherent

    00:00:25 that it's capable of detecting gravitational waves. We have these very massive mirrors. They weigh 40 kilograms, which is about 88 pounds. They're about this thick. And they're just the purest material you can imagine. The NSF, of course, had to be the source of funding for anything that would be as expensive as this. This was going to be a very high-risk experiment. It was from its very inception. If you think about this in the '70s and '80s,

    00:00:55 I'm amazed at how bold it was to do this, and visionary. It was bold and visionary. There's no other way to describe it. NSF management, the National Science Board, they had to really step up to that. And they had a lot of discussions, brought in a lot of experts. There was great debate going on. But in the end, the people who thought it could be done won the day.

    00:01:22 And they went after it. Gravitational waves were predicted by Einstein about 100 years ago. And they are dynamical perturbations in the fabric of spacetime, ripples in spacetime, if you will. A ripple in the fabric of space and time the same way as a ripple on a pond is a ripple in the shape of the surface of the water.

    00:01:52 Nobody really believed that you could ever detect them, because the size of the effect is so small-- 1,000th the diameter of a proton. Even Einstein himself never thought a detection would be possible. I tried to do this back in the 1960s when I was a student. We couldn't make any progress. We didn't have the technology.

    00:02:24 The idea was extremely simple. And it turns out to be the basis of LIGO. What the gravitational wave does is it stretches space this way and compresses space that way. So you exploit that property. Put one object here and another object over there. And let the gravitational wave go through that system. And it will change the space between these by contracting that one and extending that one. And I came to the conclusion that if you

    00:02:51 made this long enough, if you didn't make it a little pipsqueak thing like this, but you made it sort of kilometer-scale, you could probably get these extremely precise measurements. Nobody had ever made something like this before. So there's a lot of technological challenges that needed to be overcome. The precision that was required was just amazing, mind boggling.

    00:03:15 The MIT Group has typically concentrated on developing new techniques to make the instruments work and then to work on, also, data analysis algorithms that are well-informed by the understanding of the instrument. We have observed gravitational waves from two black holes forming a larger black hole. Two black holes merging together, literally, nearly the speed of light to produce a bigger black hole.

    00:03:53 How cool is that? I said, holy mackerel. This is the beginning of a whole new way of studying the universe. It's monumental. It's like Galileo using the telescope for the first time. Every time we have pointed a new instrument into the sky, nature has revealed secrets to us that we haven't known before. And so I feel very confident that this is just

    00:04:18 the beginning of such an era for gravitational wave observations, as well. Who knows what we'll see? I would love to see Einstein's face if he could read this article that we just put out. I mean, he would have been as dumbfounded as we are. Because it's a wonderful proof that all of this incredible stuff, the strong-field gravity, is in his equations. Just imagine that.

    00:04:41 To me, that's a miracle that that happened-- man's thinking and also all the elegance not only in the theory, but the elegance in the experiment. I mean, that is a human endeavor that, I think, everybody in the world should be proud of. I had to tell you that. [MUSIC PLAYING]