What is a gravitational wave?
It’s a ripple in the fabric of space and time.
Imagine that space is a giant sheet of rubber:
things that have mass cause that rubber sheet to bend, like a bowling ball on a trampoline.
The more mass, the more that space gets bent and distorted by gravity.
For example, the reason the earth goes around the sun is that the sun is very massive, causing
a big distortion of the space around it.
If you just try to move in a straight line around such a big distortion, you will find
yourself actually moving in a circle.
That’s how orbits work: there’s not an actual force pulling the planets around, just
a bending of the space.
Gravitational waves are produced whenever masses accelerate, changing the distortion
of space.
Everything with mass and/or energy can make gravitational waves.
If you and I started to dance around each other, we would also cause ripples in the
fabric of space and time.
But these would be extremely small.
Practically undetectable.
Now gravity is very weak in the scale of the other forces in the Universe, so you need
something really, really massive moving very, very fast, to make the big ripples that we
can detect.
How would you observe a ripple in space?
If the space between you and me stretched or compressed, we wouldn’t notice it if
we had made marks on our metaphorical rubber sheet, for example, using equally spaced rocks.
Because these marks would also get stretched further apart.
But there is one ruler that doesn’t get stretched, one made using the speed of light.
If the space between two points gets stretched, then light will take longer to go from one
point to the other.
And if the space gets squeezed, light takes less time to cross the two points.
This is where the LIGO experiment comes in.
It has 4 kilometer long tunnels and uses lasers to measure the changes in the distance between
the ends of the tunnels.
When a gravitational wave comes through, it stretches space in one direction, and squeezes
space in the other direction.
By measuring the interference of the lasers as they bounce between the different points,
physicists can measure very precisely whether the space in between has stretched or compressed.
And the precision needed is incredible.
To detect a gravitational wave, you need to be able to tell when something changes in
length by a few parts in 10 to the 23.
It’s like being able to tell that a stick one sextillion meters long has shrunk by 5mm.
The effect of a Gravitational Wave is so minuscule and easily confused with random noise you
need a smart data analysis technique.
Scientists hope to identify the patterns of gravitational waves by comparing the wiggles
they measure in the experiment to the wiggles they expect from Gravitational Waves.
That’s like trying to identify a song being hummed at a noisy party.
A very, very noisy party.
Imagine that your whole life you had been deaf until one day your hearing was restored.
You’d be able to explore the Universe in this whole new way.
That’s why detecting gravitational waves is so significant.
It’s a completely new way of studying the Universe.
Anytime there's a new way to observe the Universe we discover things that we didn't expect.
It's really about looking for new things that we didn't know existed, examining the extreme
edges of our knowledge of physics and testing our theories about how the Universe works.