Oregon researchers bolster major gravitational wave discovery

A breakthrough identification of distant signals in space is shedding new light on gravitational waves — one of science’s biggest mysteries.

Gravitational waves are like super-subtle ripples of gravitational energy moving through (the fabric of) space — a little like waves after you drop a pebble in the water. Except the pebble would be a supernova or colliding black hole and those waves could pass milliseconds to decades apart, or even longer. Detecting and understanding gravitational waves would advance our understanding of how galaxies have evolved and, even broader, provide a means of studying the universe essentially back to the moment after the Big Bang.

The waves were predicted by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, but scientists didn’t detect one until a century later in 2015 at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) facilities in southeast Washington and Louisiana. The waves came from the merging of two black holes about 30 times the mass of our sun and lasted just .2 seconds.