New era of astronomy as gravitational wave hunt begins »
It's like the moment when Galileo first turned a telescope towards the skies and started a new epoch of astronomy. Australian scientists are in the hunt for the last missing piece of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, gravitational waves, as the Advanced LIGO Project in the United States comes on line. LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories) aims to find gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space and time caused by the most violent events in the universe such as supernovae or collisions between black holes. "We'll find things we can't imagine - gravitational waves are a completely different messenger from light," said Professor David McClelland from The Australian National University (ANU), who leads the Australian LIGO team. "It's like the moment when Galileo first turned a telescope towards the skies and started a new epoch of astronomy. Here we shall begin a whole new and fundamentally different way of observing the Universe." Australia is a partner in Advanced LIGO with research groups from ANU and the University of Adelaide, supported by the Australian Research Council, directly contributing to its construction and commissioning. LIGO will ultimately be joined by detectors in Europe, Japan and India seeking evidence for gravitational waves, in the form of movements a fraction of the radius of a proton.
