UM Physics Professor and LIGO Researcher Keith Riles on Gravitational Waves
Riles, a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, calls the discovery “the payoff of a lifetime.”
The existence of gravitational waves was confirmed earlier this week after researchers verified a signal generated by the colliding of two black holes. University of Michigan Physics Professor Keith Riles is among the group of scientists involved in the breakthrough, which was initially recorded last September. Riles says as the black holes “came swirling together in their final moments, each one was travelling at about half the speed of light and as they came together they shook space violently.” He says the ripples from that cosmic collision were recorded on Earth approximately 1.3 billion years later. Riles adds that before making the big announcement, it was crucial to rule out a variety of environmental disturbances that could have triggered the wave detectors.
“Anything that we could think of that might possibly interfere with signals in our interferometer, and we checked all of those channels –and there are literally thousands of such data channels to look at– we went through them systematically and verified that nothing could account for what we saw.”
Riles says there are plans to continue improving the sensitivity of the gravitational wave detectors, and expects those upgrades to result in additional discoveries in the future. Riles is holding two public lectures on the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus on Saturday, February 13 and Saturday, February 20, 2016.
