The Feb. 11 announcement that scientists had, for the first time, proof that space itself vibrates is expected to unleash a bevy of discoveries about things that go bump in the proverbial darkness.
In a flash, the crash released the equivalent of 50 times the energy of all the stars in the universe, powerful enough to ever-so-slightly jiggle L-shaped, 2.5 mile-long laser beams on Earth that comprise the heart of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO.
LIGO observatories in Louisiana and Washington had just been upgraded when the detection was made. Scientists spent months verifying the gravitational waves’ footprint, which changed the length of the laser light arms an amount 10,000 times smaller than the diameter of a proton. Meanwhile, LIGO continued to monitor for other space-shaking cosmic booms.
“Before this, we didn’t even know that black holes existed in pairs,” University of Florida physicist David Reitze, now serving as LIGO director at the California Institute of Technology, told the House Science Committee last week.
“It’s the start of a new astronomy,” added Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist David Shoemaker.
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