On 14 September 2015, Carl was working at LIGO Livingstone. He finished working at 2.00am and left his post to an operator. Two hours later a dramatic signal appeared. It was morning in Germany and Marco Drago, a young physicist from the collaboration alerted the LIGO community. The signal seemed too good to be true and no one quite believed it. After months of effort everyone was convinced.

There were two black holes; one 36 times as massive as the sun, and the other 29 times as massive as the sun. Each spiraled together at incredible speed, initially around 50 times per second, then at 100 times per second until they finally merged into a single black hole, giving out a vast gravitational wave explosion; the biggest burst of energy in the universe ever observed by mankind. What is incredible was that the ripple of gravitational waves travelled for a billion years before it reached the solar system. By the time it reached us the ripple was less than the size of a proton!

The new black hole was 62 times as massive as the sun. A mass of three times the mass of the sun had been turned into pure gravitational waves in less than one tenth of a second.

LIGO has recognised the importance of their international collaborators in the discovery including the AIGRC’s role in controlling the instability of the LIGO laser, enabling the increase in power and sensitivity to bring these first signals.

The Australian International Gravitational Research Centre (AIGRC), Gingin was always planned to become a large scale observatory in the Southern Hemisphere to help triangulate the signals and pin point where the ‘sounds’ are coming from. When that happens, the improved sensitivity will enable to physicists to determine:

How many black holes are out there in the universe?

How much of the mass of the universe has already been lost into black holes?

How fast is the universe expanding?

The research by Professor Blair and his team at UWA and AIGRC has been heavily funded by an Australian Research Council grant with further support from the University of Western Australia.