Einstein's wave - Gravitationale waves detected for the first time
6.00 pm
Where: Department of Humanities, via Tomaso Gar, 14 - Trento, Room 6
Einstein was right: gravitational waves do exist and open a new window on the universe. For the first time, scientists were able to detect their signal. A group of researchers from the University of Trento has participated in this breakthrough discovery.
A research group that has been working on the detection of gravitational waves at the Physics department of the University of Trento and at Tifpa (Trento Institute for Fundamental Physics Applications) was actively involved in this discovery.
For the part concerning data analysis the group, led by experimental physicist Giovanni Andrea Prodi, includes researchers from the INFN in Padua and young PhD students in Trento. The Albert Einstein Institute in Hannover and the University of Florida are also involved in this collaboration. The group is also working on experimental projects aimed at improving detector sensitivity with researchers from the INFN in Padua and a number of PhD students in both Trento and Padua.
But what are gravitational waves exactly? They are ripples in the space-time, generated by very powerful cosmic events like the collision of black holes or neutron stars or the collapse of a star, that occurred somewhere in the universe, far from the Earth.
The gravitational waves were detected on September 14, 2015 at 11:51 a.m. (Italian time) by both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston (Louisiana), and Hanford, (Washington), both designed and led by Caltech and MIT.
This discovery marks a new era for physics, as it opens an unprecedented new window onto the cosmos and its history. The discovery, with data detected by the two interferometers, was confirmed in a joint paper by the US LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the European Virgo Collaboration that was published today in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.
This discovery is really two discoveries: gravitational waves were detected for the first time and, within those waves, scientists detected the collision and the merger of two black holes, an event that had been predicted and never so far observed. The signal lasted 0.2 seconds.
The group in Trento together with the colleagues in Padua and researchers in Hannover and Florida has defined an analysis algorithm, a software that scans the data generated by the detectors looking for unknown signals, that is, gravitational waves.
On 14 September 2015, three minutes after the signal detection, Prodi’s group and the Hannover team confirmed the data and labelled them as probable gravitational waves, pointing out to other scientists this ground-breaking observation.
The conference, that will take place just a few hours away from the international announcement with the participation of scientists from the University of Trento, will present scientific explanations and some behind-the-scenes facts of this epic discovery.
Among others, Lorenzo Pavesi, director of the Physics department, and Marco Drago from the Albert Einstein Institute in Hannover, will be present.
