Nobel Prize 2017 in physics awarded to three scientists for the detection of gravitational waves
Three researchers have been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for their work in detecting gravitational waves
— ripples in space and time that travel throughout our Universe. The
recipients are Rainer Weiss, a physics professor at MIT, and Kip Thorne
and Barry Barish, who are both physics professors at Caltech.
The trio are key members of LIGO, or the Laser
Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory — a scientific
collaboration that made history when it announced last year the first ever detection of gravitational waves.
Over a century ago, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of these
waves in his theory of general relativity. He argued that every object
in the Universe warps the space and time around it, and when an object
moves, it creates ripples in this space-time — gravitational waves — a
bit like ripples in a pond.LIGO boasts two specialized detectors in Washington and Louisiana,
designed to pick up these ripples. Specifically, the observatories look
for the gravitational waves stemming from violent mergers of super dense
faraway objects, such as black holes or leftover stellar remnants known
as neutron stars. When these bodies come together, they spin around
each other rapidly, several times per second, before joining to make one
incredibly dense object. It’s like a cosmic dance that creates
gargantuan ripples in the fabric of space-time, which travel outward at
the speed of light, and eventually reach Earth. By the time they reach
our planet, the waves have greatly diminished, needing extremely sen
In
February 2016, LIGO announced that its two observatories had detected
the waves from black holes merging 1.3 billion light-years away for the
first time ever. The discovery revolutionized the field of astronomy,
giving scientists a new way to study the mysterious, dark objects that
lurk in the distant Universe. LIGO has since detected three additional
black hole mergers — and more announcements may come soon. A third
European observatory, Virgo, has also detected one of the mergers,
allowing researchers to locate the source of these waves more
accurately than ever before. “We have unlocked this new window of the
Universe, and we’re just starting to peek in,” says Laura Cadonati, a
LIGO collaborator and professor of physics at Georgia Institute of
Technology. “This discovery has been groundbreaking because it’s not the
end of the path; we’ve really opened the door to new discovery.”
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the
Nobel Prizes, said that Weiss, Thorne, and Barish deserved the award
specifically “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the
observation of gravitational waves.” Cadonati says that many within the
collaboration “look up to them as the founders who started it all.”
Weiss championed the idea of using miles-long lasers as the best way to
detect gravitational waves on Earth, and the technology is a fundamental
tool used in the LIGO detectors today. He also helped identify sources
of background noise that might muck up detections. “He’s really been on
the forefront of all the construction,” Cadonati tells The Verge. “He really was the one who made it happen.”
Meanwhile, Thorne is the reason why LIGO looks for
mergers in the first place. Many scientists thought the explosions of
stars would create the best waves for detection, but Thorne said that
black holes or neutron stars rotating around one another would make the
best sources for study.