{"id":13344,"date":"2023-11-10T08:10:00","date_gmt":"2023-11-10T13:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/?p=13344"},"modified":"2023-11-06T14:47:02","modified_gmt":"2023-11-06T19:47:02","slug":"found-the-gravitational-waves-that-alter-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/2023\/11\/10\/found-the-gravitational-waves-that-alter-space\/","title":{"rendered":"Found: The Gravitational Waves That Alter Space"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Michael Lam \u201911 was part of the team that finally discovered a phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein more than a century ago.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While we sit and as we sleep, the entirety of the universe is being expanded and contracted by gravitational waves that imperceptibly alter the woof and warp of space itself. This astonishing discovery was confirmed on June 28, when NANOGrav, a collaborative of more than 190 scientists from around the globe, released the results of their 15-year search for the elusive waves. Michael Lam \u201911, a research scientist with the SETI Institute, was a member of the NANOGrav team. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though the existence of these perturbations in the gravitational field had been predicted by Albert Einstein\u2019s theory of general relativity, which he published in 1915, finding them took more than 100 years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Einstein discovered that gravity bends space, and does so in proportion to the mass of objects. Think of placing a bowling ball on a trampoline and you get an idea of what it looks like when large objects like planets or stars distort the shape of the space around them. Gravitational waves are fluctuations in the gravitational field \u2014 most likely propagated by huge cosmic events \u2014 that travel and permeate space, creating a kind of background hum of gravitational activity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These gravitational waves have been notoriously hard to detect, but Lam and his colleagues developed a novel approach to find them \u2014 one that involved using pulsars, collapsed stars that produce energy that is observed at very regular intervals. \u201cPulsars are like clocks, and we measure when their pulses arrive at our telescopes,\u201d Lam explains. \u201cIf the pulses arrive early, or late, maybe they got squeezed a bit in compressed space, or maybe space was a little stretched by the waves.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, the discovery process was not so straightforward. \u201cThere could be a million other reasons for an inconsistency in the pulses. Maybe the pulsar is in orbit with another object or there\u2019s some other interference,\u201d says Lam. \u201cWe weren\u2019t quite sure how precise and accurate the pulsars would be, and what it would take to make our detectors work.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The team was able to confirm the gravitational waves were interfering with the pulsar signals when they looked at pulsars in the same sector of the sky and found similar irregularities in their pulse patterns. \u201cWe knew then what we were seeing,\u201d Lam recalls. \u201cThat was incredibly exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

“We\u2019ve opened up a new window into the universe.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The source of Lam\u2019s love of astronomy is not unique but it has a distinctly Colgate twist. Growing up in New York City, Lam was astonished on his first visit to the countryside when he looked up and could see the night sky. Soon after, Lam\u2019s parents, Cindy Sherling \u201983 and John Lam \u201980, brought him to Colgate\u2019s Foggy Bottom Observatory for a tour hosted by astronomy professor Thomas Balonek, who later ended up being Lam\u2019s undergraduate adviser. \u201cI remember going up a ladder and looking into the eyepiece of the telescope and seeing Jupiter with its atmospheric bands, and they gave me a picture of Jupiter. It was my first experience with a telescope, and that\u2019s when I knew what I wanted to do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The next task for Lam and his colleagues is to suss out the source of the gravitational waves. \u201cI\u2019ve been telling people that the most mundane explanation is that they could be coming from supermassive black holes in the center of emerging galaxies,\u201d says Lam, laughing. \u201cIn reality, there are probably many different sources. One possibility is that they are from moments after the Big Bang, during the period called inflation. We haven\u2019t really had any direct observation of that period so far.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reprising Winston Churchill\u2019s saying, Lam calls his team\u2019s discovery the end of the beginning. \u201cWe figured the waves were there and we found them. More importantly, we\u2019ve opened up a new window into the universe,\u201d he says. \u201cEvery time you do that you not only understand the universe better, but you start to see new things that you didn\u2019t even know were there. What new physics are we going to find now? Who knows?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 Chris Quirk<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Lam \u201911 was part of the team that finally discovered a phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein more than a century ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1260,"featured_media":13346,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1835,638,1846,1839,1842,1837,1845,1834,1843,1841,870,1838,1840],"coauthors":[1439],"class_list":["post-13344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-discover","tag-albert-einstein","tag-astronomy","tag-churchill","tag-cosmic","tag-detectors","tag-gravitational-field","tag-gravitational-waves","tag-gravity","tag-observatory","tag-orbit","tag-space","tag-theory-of-general-relativity","tag-time"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/palXSH-3te","amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2023\/10\/NANOGrav_PTA_GWB_15yr_wide-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1260"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13344"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13741,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13344\/revisions\/13741"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13344"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=13344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}