Last week I spent my free time binge-watching “Ripper Street” on Netflix. Daniel A. Hemberger, a professional watcher of the skies, was continuing his research into simulating binary black hole systems to aid gravitational-wave detection and parameter estimation. It’s a mouthful, I know. Basically, Hemberger, 30, a 2003 Exeter High grad, has created a method of predicting what a sort of listening device for gravitational waves might detect when two black holes collide far out in space. When that occurs, it creates what scientists call a chirp. Not a sound, it’s an intense wave of gravitational energy that ripples out through the universe. It’s a theory for the ages that Hemberger helped prove last month.
“It’s definitely an effort that spanned many decades and involved thousands of people,” Hemberger said. “By the time it gets here, the energy of a wave is a small fraction of a proton, yet represents one of the most energetic events humans have ever detected, except the Big Bang.”
Gravitational waves are something Einstein predicted as part of his theory of relativity, but which until now had never been proved. Hemberger and the research team he collaborates with at California Institute of Technology and other scientific and learning institutions around the globe already had their highly improbable “Eureka!” moment last month. LIGO, which stands for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, is a large-scale physics experiment aimed at directly detecting gravitational waves. LIGO, which consists of two observatories, one in Louisiana, the other in Washington state, recorded evidence of the first gravitational waves ever detected, on Sept. 14 at 4:50 a.m. “The waves descended on Earth from the Southern Hemisphere, passed through the Earth, and emerged at the Earth’s surface first at the LIGO interferometer in Livingston, Louisiana, and then, 7 milliseconds later, at the LIGO interferometer in Hanford, Washington,” an agency press release said.
Hemberger said his part was to help develop a simulation of what a gravitational wave might look like as it passed through the Earth and was picked up by the LIGO observatories. When the wave was detected, one of the ways to prove they had what they thought they had was to take the actual measurements and compare them with the simulation developed by Hemberger and his teammates.