LIGO's Discovery and the Dawn of Gravitational-Wave Astronomy

摘要

Our present understanding of gravity not as an instantaneous force, but as an intrinsic property of spacetime itself, emerged in 1915 with the conception of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. General relativity was subjected to an increasingly stringent list of checks and tests over the years, passing with flying colours each time. By the end of the 20th century, the only conspicuous omissions from that list were experiments designed to directly verify two of relativity's most fundamental predictions: black holes and gravitational waves. The prospects for both of these phenomena were correlated, as merging black holes are a promising astrophysical source of gravitational waves - which in turn provide the sole means of directly observing the former.