Phil Plait at Slate calls the detection of gravitational waves the biggest science story of 2016—even bigger than the discovery of Proxima Centauri b.
The waves were detected by LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory), an impressive instrument consisting of two identical detectors in Livingston, LA, and Hanford, WA. The geographic separation of the two detectors minimizes the possibility that local noise could generate a false positive and also helps determine the location of the source of detected gravity waves.
Plait has posted a video by Derek Muller, creator of the Veritasium science videos. Muller visits Rana Adhikari, professor of physics at Cal Tech to learn more about gravitational waves and how LIGO works. You can watch the video here.
Next up, writes Plait, Chiara Mingarelli is working on a “ridiculously sophisticated system” to detect a noisy background of gravitational waves coming from all directions.
Concludes Plait, “We receive a lot of information from space, but it comes in only a few flavors: light waves, meteorites, subatomic particles. With the discovery of gravitational waves, an entirely new way to view the Universe has come online. It was astonishingly difficult to get to this point, but human curiosity is an immensely powerful force. It accelerates our minds. Maybe Newton and Einstein never put equations to that, but it’s a fact of science nonetheless.”
