Frontier and centre | ANU Science, Health & Medicine – Science at ANU

Image caption: Professor David McClelland, Professor Susan Scott, Dr Robert Ward and Dr Bram Slagmolen, from the ANU Research School of Physics with the TorPeDO, A low-frequency gravitational force sensor.

Fast forward to the present and the gravitational-wave observatories in the United States and Italy have detected the mergers of two black holes, the collision of two neutron stars and possibly also a black hole eating a neutron star. Neutron stars and black holes are thesuper-dense remains of dead stars.

We were quite astonished by the first successful detection of gravitational waves on the evening of 14 September 2015, which was from two big black holes smashing into each other 1.3 billion light years away, McClelland says.

Scott says the first detection was beyond exciting. All thoughts about Australia gaining yet another Prime

Minister in the previous hour vanished and instead my mind was racing with the wonderful and immense opportunities for discovery that lay ahead, she says.

The three founders of the project, from the US, won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics on behalf of the international team for this ground-breaking work.

Being part of a Nobel Prize-winning discovery is the highlight of my career, McClelland says.

I am so fortunate to be supported by an outstanding team at ANU, including long termers Bram Slagmolen, Robert Ward and Dan Shaddock.

The speed with which the Nobel Prize was awarded is testament to the enormity of the discovery in the physics world, Scott says.

Soon after the Nobel Prize was awarded, the international collaboration detected two neutron stars smashing together, which brought some light to their work and opened up a new scientific field where gravitational- wave physicists and astronomers could work together.

The LIGO detectors were recently taken offline for upgrades to improve their range and precision.

Instruments called quantum squeezers, designed at ANU, were installed on the LIGO detectors. The squeezers dampen quantum noise that can drown out weak gravitational-wave signals. This and other upgrades have improved the sensing capabilities of the detectors.

In this new dawn for space discovery, ANU will establish a centre next year to formally bring together gravitational-wave scientists with astronomers, to ensure the Universitys leading role in gravitational astrophysics both nationally and internationally into the future. The ANU SkyMapper telescope, with a wide field of view and capability to scan large areas of the southern sky quickly, will play an important role in the emerging field of gravitational-wave astronomy.

The new ANU Centre for Gravitational Astrophysics (CGA), bridging the ANU Research School of Physics and the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, will play a vital role in finding more violent events in the Universe.

We expect to detect gravitational waves from lots more cataclysmic events including those weve never detected before such as nearby exploding stars and neutron stars spinning rapidly in space, which produce much fainter signals, Scott says.

McClelland also expects some surprising discoveries in the future.

The most important discoveries may well be objects on the warped side of the Universe we never knew existed, he says.

This story originally appeared in ANU Reporter.

Main image credit: Carl Knox, OzGrav ARC Centre of Excellence

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