An illustration of the collision of two black holes, an event detected for the first time ever by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).
The SXS (Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes) Project
The 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to scientists who helped pioneer the discovery of gravitational waves. Australia is playing an important role in gravitational-wave astronomy.
This year’s winners.
Illustration by N. Elmehed. NobelPrize.org
Atoms blown up in the right way could signal when a gravitational wave is passing through.
A simulation of the latest binary black hole merger detected by LIGO. Blue indicates weak fields and yellow indicates strong fields.
Numerical-relativistic Simulation: S Ossokine, A Buonanno (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics) and the Simulating eXtreme Spacetime project Scientific Visualization: T Dietrich (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics), R Haas (NCSA)
Scientists have made a third detection of gravitational waves, again caused by the merger of two black holes. But they think there's something different about the black holes in this case.
Artist’s conception of two merging black holes, spinning in a nonaligned fashion.
LIGO/Caltech/MIT/Sonoma State (Aurore Simonnet)
These ripples in the very fabric of the universe were hypothesized by Einstein a century ago. Now scientists have detected them for the third time in a year and a half – ushering in a new era in astrophysics.
When black holes collide, gravitational waves are created in space itself (image is a computer simulation).
The SXS (Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes) Project
Einstein called entanglement "spooky action at a distance”. But now it's been used to design an incredibly sensitive detection method for gravitational waves.
The OzGRav Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery will enable Australian researchers to be at the forefront of gravitational wave astronomy.
An illustration showing the merger of two black holes and the gravitational waves that ripple outward.
LIGO/T. Pyle
The observation of gravitational waves from a second black hole merger implies there are many more black holes in the universe than scientists had previously anticipated.
Scientific advances – including the recent discovery of gravitational waves – force us to deal with numbers so extreme they're virtually inconceivable.