Scientists hear cosmic hum from gravitational waves

astronomers for the first time have detected the faint hum of gravitational waves echoing throughout the Universe teams of scientists across the world have been monitoring space to observe the phenomenon which Albert Einstein predicted more than a century ago they don't exactly know what's causing the hum but it may be coming from supermassive black holes spiraling together before merging let's get more on this we can speak

to Michael Lamb a research scientist at The seti Institute he was part of the team that conducted the nanograph study he joins us from Washington DC thank you for joining the program so if I understand this correctly scientists had suspected that these gravitational waves existed but now they have proof of this uh we actually have had proof of them before the ligo and Virgo collaborations in

2016 they ended up detecting gravitational waves but in a different part of the spectrum so what I mean by that is if you look with your eyes you see light of a certain wavelength range so you can see red to blue but there's other light that exists out there there's infrared which is longer wavelength than red there's ultraviolet which is a shorter wavelength than blue there's

x-rays there's radio waves and so all of these different kinds of waves are electromagnetic waves in 2016 ligo and Virgo announced the discovery of gravitational waves for the first time which is a completely different way of observing the universe they observe very high frequency gravitational waves that is waves with very very very short wavelengths and so what we have done for the first time is open

up a second window on the gravitational wave Universe okay looking at very very very long period waves right and and you think that these waves are caused by massive black holes spiraling together what will that tell us more about black holes themselves it will tell us it can tell us a little bit about black holes um one of the more important things I think is that

it will tell us a lot about the environments around these massive black holes we know that these massive black holes exists at the center of every Galaxy our galaxy has a massive black hole in the center and we know that galaxies merge together when we look out in in space and so as the two galaxies merge we expect that the black hole should merge um and

we now have or we think we have some evidence for this that is one of the possible mechanisms of the gravitational waves so how do you take this forward how does this how do you go forward with this research yeah great question um we have every time astronomers have opened a new window into studying the universe we have found really new and exciting things for us

as we observe more of these objects called pulsars which make up our detector as we observe them for longer we're able to gain better sensitivity and that will help us answer a lot of fundamental questions about the universe how Galaxies have merged and evolved over the entire course of the Universe um possibly finding interesting signals out there from the very very very beginning of the universe

around the Big Bang lots of other possible things and so this is only really the beginning and we really think that we're opening up this window to new and exciting discoveries it's interesting you say this is the beginning because Albert Einstein in 1916 was the first to kind of think about gravitational waves or the idea of gravitational waves as a scientist researcher do you find it

incredible that so far back he was able to predict their existence I do I think Albert Einstein is incredible in many ways uh he has come up with an incr uh an entire framework of how we understand gravity in the universe and so far nothing has been able to break that understanding uh of gravity uh I think what's even more incredible is that it's taken a

hundred years for us to reach the point where we were first able to detect very high frequency gravitational waves with ligo and Virgo and then a few years later uh we have evidence for low frequency gravitational waves um from collaborations such as my own and other International Partners around the world it just goes to show that even though these were predicted by Einstein it's been an

incredibly hard effort in order to do so and it's taken the work of lots of people over many decades well thank you for your amazing work Michael Lamb research scientist at the city Institute thank you thank you