With over 300 high-significance gravitational wave detections, we now have a huge unsolved puzzle. Will we invest in finding the solution?
If you want to detect a gravitational wave, you have to design something extraordinary. Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime — distortions in the very fabric of spacetime itself — that propagate at the speed of light and that alternately stretch/expand space in one dimension, perpendicular to the direction of the wave’s propagation, while compressing/shrinking space at a 90 angle to the expanded dimension. Even the strongest of these oscillating, compressing-and-rarifying motions cause very tiny changes in distance: of the scale of a few atoms for an object the size of planet Earth. And yet, with the right technology, like a high-precision laser interferometer, we can detect these changes directly, pinpointing the origin and properties of the astrophysical event that generated these gravitational waves.
It was back in 2015 that the twin LIGO detectors, one in Livingston, LA and one in Hanford, WA, first turned on, and within days, they had spotted our first gravitational wave event: GW150914, which indicated the merger of two black holes, one of 36 solar masses and the other of 29…
