Eons ago as cellular life was just beginning to spread here on Earth, two black holes spiraling in the distant reaches of space circled each other and merged in a violent collision.
That collision lasted all of 20 milliseconds but was powerful enough to send a shiver through the fabric of space-time.
Some 1.3 billion years later, life on Earth has evolved enough to build laser detectors so sensitive they could feel those infinitesimal shivers at the exact moment they arrived and rippled past last September.
That detection on Sept. 14 was an event so momentous that physicists liken it to Galileo peering through a telescope for the first time or the Apollo moon landing. And it confirmed Einstein’s prediction of gravitational waves made 100 years ago as part of his theory of general relativity.
On Thursday morning, scientists with the Laser-Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory Scientific Collaboration revealed their findings in a live media broadcast.
“We have detected gravitational waves,” said David Reitze, executive director of LIGO at the California Institute of Technology. “We did it.”
In a packed conference room in the physics building at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, professors and students watching the announcement on a widescreen burst into applause.
Several offered their congratulations to Eugeniy E. Mikhailov, an assistant physics professor who has been working on LIGO technology since 2003.
“It’s pleasant to see it, finally,” Mikhailov said. “It was extremely hard to be quiet, but it’s extremely wonderful because of what it means for us.”
Said Reitze: “This is not just about the detection of gravitational waves. That’s the story today. But what’s really exciting is what comes next.
“I think we’re opening a window onto the universe — a window of gravitational wave astronomy.”
The detection was made using twin LIGO observatories — one in Louisiana and the other in Washington state — considered the most precise measuring device ever built.
“We are trying to measure things basically at one-one thousandth the diameter of a proton,” Reitze said.
“Let me put that in perspective,” he said. “If we were trying to measure the distance between the sun and the nearest star, which is about three and a quarter light-years away, LIGO is capable of measuring that to a level of about the width of a human hair. That’s remarkable precision.”
It’s also a technological challenge. But LIGO spokeswoman at Louisiana State University Gabriela Gonzalez said that’s why they built two identical detectors and spaced them far apart — to make sure they’re both measuring the exact same tiny distortions of space-time.
The major funder for LIGO is the National Science Foundation, with assistance from Germany and Australia.
About 1,000 scientists around the world have helped in the research. Mikhailov is part of the team working to suppress the natural quantum noise LIGO picks up, and improve its ability to “hear” the sound gravitational waves make as they create a tiny distortion in the detectors.
Gonzalez played a recording of the short chirp LIGO detected from the black hole collision.
“That’s one of the beautiful things about this — we are not only going to be seeing the universe, we are going to be listening to it,” Gonzalez said.
Mikhailov is working now on next-generation technology that will enable LIGO to probe even more distant astronomical events that generate gravitational waves, such as supernovas or colliding binary stars or black holes.
In time, he said, listening to the universe will become commonplace.
“The press will be bored,” Mikhailov said. “Every day, you will hear of yet another black hole detected.”
Astrophysicists spent months analyzing the data from last September, making sure it was real, even as rumors swirled in the science community of their historic discovery.
“It’s the first time the universe has spoken to us through gravitational waves,” Reitze said. “Up until now, we’ve been deaf to gravitational waves, but today we are able to hear them.
“This was truly, I think, a scientific moon shot. I really believe that. And we did it. We landed on the moon.”
Dietrich can be reached by phone at 757-247-7892.
