How To Hear The Universe

About fifty years later,

on a war night in Argentina,

beneath the moon, the stars, and the sky,

a young girl named Gaby Gonzalez looked up.

She, too, wondered what secrets lay beyond the stars.

[…]

In school, Gaby learned about physics. The science of energy and motion attracted her like a magnet. Gaby thought physics could help answer her questions about the universe, just as Einstein had.

When she went to college, Gaby learned about Einstein’s ripples in space-time. Scientists had tried for many years to find them. But they only heard background noise from crashing waves, gusting winds, and passing trucks.

Ripples in space-time remained just an idea.

[…]

Soon Gaby met a new professor working on hearing ripples in space-time. She leapt at the opportunity to help hear the distant universe. With his help, Gaby set out to tackle the problem of background noise.

She spent long days and long nights

thinking,

testing,

and measuring.

Gaby’s work brought the world on step closer to space-time.

 

By this time, scientists were ready to build two big machines called LIGO, which would help detect space-time ripples. One would be built in Hanford, Washington, and the others in Livingston, Louisiana. The LIGO project needed experts to help predict and remove background noise.

[…]

Suddenly, in the early morning, the LIGO Livingston detector chirped. The LIGO Hanford detector chirped seven milliseconds later.

The next day, Gaby awoke to an alert from LIGO.

Could it be?

Right away, Gaby and her team studied waves that LIGO detected.

They measured and re-measured,

calculated and re-calculated,

analyzed and re-analyzed,

until they were certain of what they found:

ripples in space-time caused by the collisions of two black-holes!

 

One hundred years after Einstein’s predication,

Gaby and her LIGO team proved him right.

With a new way to hear the universe,

we can now uncover it’s secrets,

one ripple at a time.