Back in 1915, a young patent clerk named Albert Einstein published a paper he’d been working on, called the Theory of General Relativity.  Einstein’s paper talked about how massive objects could bend and distort the fabric of space and time, creating gravitational waves like the ripples emanating from a stone thrown into a pond.  It took scientists a hundred years for scientists to prove Einstein right, but in 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory or LIGO directly observed gravitational waves created by the collision of two black holes. As a result of that collision, LIGO was able to observe unmistakable waves with peaks tens to hundreds of kilometers apart.  That observation, which one its chief researchers the Nobel Prize in physics, may have just been the warmup. On June 29, 2023, four different radio astronomy teams simultaneously observed what have been described as “monster” gravitational waves, with wavelengths measured in light years, sloshing through the entire fabric of the galaxy.   Scott Ransom is an astrophysicist with the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a senior member of NanoGrav, one of the four international teams that observed the gravity wave phenomenon.  Scott Ransom joins us now by phone.

 

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