Abstract
On September 14, 2015, for the first time in human history, mankind detected gravitational waves, a prediction of Einstein’s general relativity, which in this case had been produced during the merging of two black holes in a very distant galaxy. This fact represents an awesome technological and scientific achievement, comparable perhaps to the moment when Galileo used a telescope for the first time to contemplate the cosmos. A second detection, produced on December 26, 2015, confirmed the beginning of an era in which the astronomy of gravitational waves will allow us to contemplate the Universe, or rather, to “hear” it, in a totally new way, and that surely will provide us with many and interesting surprises.
This essay won an award in the VII Outreach Competition of CPAN (Spanish National Center of Particle, Astroparticle and Nuclear Physics), www.i-cpan.es.
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Notes
- 1.
A pulsar emits radiation that can be detected from Earth and from which we can infer orbital properties, for example.
- 2.
The reduction of the distance due to emission of gravitational waves also occurs in the Earth-Sun system, but it is nothing to be worried about. The loss of power is of about 200 W (less than the consumption of a toaster), to be compared with the 10\(^{25}\) W emitted in the binary pulsar indicated above.
- 3.
In fact, a major oil company is already testing the usage in prospecting of a seismic detector which had been designed for use in gravitational wave detectors. Every basic research ends up producing practical applications, and even more so in cases like this field, which requires the most cutting-edge technology in disciplines as diverse as seismology, vacuum engineering, engineering of control systems or quantum optics, among other.
- 4.
In fact, the LIGO collaboration has recently confirmed a second detection occurred on December 25, 2016. The merging of black holes in the Universe is more frequent than we had previously imagined.
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Carmona, J.M. (2018). Gravitational Waves: The “Sound” of the Universe. In: Hossenfelder, S. (eds) Experimental Search for Quantum Gravity. FIAS Interdisciplinary Science Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64537-7_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64537-7_7
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