Gravitational Wave Detection: A Personal Perspective

摘要

On 14 September 2015, 100 years after Einstein's prediction, gravitational waves were finally detected by the groundbased Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US [1]. The detection was nearly perfect. The signal is so strong that it is visible by eye in the data (Fig 1). The waveform beautifully matches the expectation from the coalescence of two black holes 30 times heavier than our Sun. Our Gravitational Wave Astronomy group at the University of Western Australia [2] (Fig 2) is a long-time member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. We have been searching for gravitational waves on the same LIGO data at the same time of the first discovery using a pipeline led by our group and Tsinghua University in China. But like many others, our first thought was: "This is too good to be true!"