Gravitational Waves

The LIGO detector in Louisiana. More information about LIGO is available on the world wide web at www.ligo.caltech.edu.

A source that sits still will create a static field pattern, like a steel ball sitting peacefully on a sheet of rubber. A moving source will create a spreading wave pattern in the field, like a bug thrashing on the surface of a pond. Although we have started with the gravitational field as the simplest example of a static field, stars and planets do more stately gliding than thrashing, so gravitational waves are not easy to detect. Newton's theory of gravity does not describe gravitational waves, but they are predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity. J.H. Taylor and R.A. Hulse were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993 for giving indirect evidence that Einstein's waves actually exist. They discovered a pair of exotic, ultradense stars called neutron stars orbiting one another very closely, and showed that they were losing orbital energy at the rate predicted by Einstein's theory. A CalTech MIT collaboration is currently building a pair of gravitational wave detec tors called LIGO to search for more direct evidence of gravitational waves. Since they are essentially the most sensitive vibration detectors ever made, they are being built in quiet rural areas, and signals will be compared between them to make sure that they were not due to passing trucks. The project only has enough funding to keep the detectors operating for a few years after they become operational in 2000, and they can only hope that during that time, somewhere in the universe, a sufficiently violent cataclysm will occur to make a detectable gravitational wave. (More accurately, they want the wave to arive in our solar system during that time, although it will have been produced millions of years before.)