Gravitational Waves

You wouldn’t know it, but right now, as you read this article, your body is being squeezed and stretched. You don’t feel it because the amplitude of this flexing is only about 1/10,000th the diameter of a proton, but it is happening.

What’s causing it is not anything local, nor anything to do with your body itself. In fact, the entire Earth is being squeezed and stretched in the same manner. Instead, the source origin of these forces acting on you is located millions or even billions of light-years away.

Whilst we can be thankful that we don’t experience these effects on the macro scale, we are reminded that there are extreme forces at play in the Universe – powerful enough to distort the very rigid fabric of space-time itself.

The cause of this effect is gravitational waves, and the sources that are generating them, are massive compact objects in binary systems – like neutron stars or black holes – in inspiral orbits, drawing closer and closer together and emitting gravitational radiation in the form of these waves.

These waves were a predicted outcome of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and for the most part of 100 years, they were just that, theory. Then in the ’70s, indirect evidence was published that showcased a binary pulsar-neutron star system whose orbit was decaying with the exact predicted value that Einstein had determined – and the only explanation was that the system was emitting gravitational radiation. This exciting discovery went on to earn a Nobel Prize.

Then in 2015, it finally happened. With technology and instruments advancing to the threshold needed to make a discovery, two kilometre-sized laser interferometers based in the US (designed as a giant version of the Michelson-Morely experiment) confirmed the first-ever chirp from a system of massive compact objects as they merged. TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...