From Einstein's general theory of relativity to gravitational‐wave astronomy

Abstract

In his 1916 article [1] predicting the existence of gravitational waves, Einstein wrote that they were too weak to be of any consequence. A century later, the world’s attention was captured by the February 11th announcement, demonstrating how wrong this was. In a landmark publication in Physical Review Letters [2], an international team reports the first direct detection of the gravitational waves emitted by a pair of black holes (29 and 36 solar masses) during their final few orbits before merging to form a single 62 solar-mass black hole. Physicists love extremes, because pushing the limits leads to insight and understanding. This discovery, a short chirp lasting about a quarter-second (see Fig. 1, adapted from [2]), pushes the limits in many different directions. Let’s start with the human side. The first unsuccessful attempts to detect gravitational waves were smallinvestigator experiments made about fifty years ago. In contrast, the discovery paper had about 1000 authors (20% are from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, for which I am the Managing Director). Some of these authors have worked towards the discovery for more than forty years. The detector technology also pushes the limits. The advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) instruments are located 3000 km apart, in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana. The effect of the gravitational waves is to distort the effective path length between pairs of mirrors hanging 4 km apart in a seismically-isolated high-vacuum system. At the peak of the signal the measured length change in each detector arm is about 0.002 femtometers, 1/1000 the diameter of a hydrogen nucleus. This is a fractional precision of a part in 1021; analogous to measuring the distance to the nearest star (Proxima Centuri) to an accuracy of 40 μm. I don’t know of any other measurement done with comparable precision. The binary system we observed was about one billion light years distant from earth; over some tens of milliseconds it converted about three solar masses of gravitational binding energy into gravitational waves. During that brief time, the system emitted more power than the optical luminosity of every star in every galaxy in the visible universe. My kids, jaded by generations of Star Wars movies, were unimpressed until I told them that in comparison with this, the “Death Star”, capable of vaporizing entire planets, is child’s toy, a harmless plaything. Three solarmasses is enough energy to vaporize every planet in many galaxies! Binary black hole systems like this one could not have been detected in any other way, because (being black!) they do not emit any light or electromagnetic energy. But there are intriguing reports [3] that a team analyzing data from the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) detector on board NASA’s Fermi satellite observed a gammaray burst 0.4 seconds after the merger. So Nature might still surprise us. Could such systems be surrounded by clouds of gas or dust? We can’t be sure now, but within a few years, I am confident that we will know the answer to this and to many other questions. The rate at which our knowledge will now increase is breathtaking. In their first observing run the advanced LIGOdetectors were a factor of three below their final design sensitivity. That doesn’t seem like much, but keep in mind that the expected number of sources/detections is proportional to the observable volume of space, which scales like the cube of the sensitivity. So the second observing run, starting this September and lasting six months, should observe about a dozen black hole mergers, and the third observing run, starting in 2017, should see about one hundred. It’s going to be quite a ride – a golden age of gravitational wave astronomy. By the end of it, we’ll know themass distribution and spatial density of these stellarmass black hole binary systems. And perhaps our catalog of observations will include new extremes, such as systemswith high spin, or neutron-star/black-hole binaries, or other surprises.