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How LIGO discovered gravitational waves -- and what might be next

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Gabriela González |

TED2017

• April 2017

More than 100 years after Albert Einstein predicted gravitational waves -- ripples in space-time caused by violent cosmic collisions -- LIGO scientists confirmed their existence using large, extremely precise detectors in Louisiana and Washington. Astrophysicist Gabriela González of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration tells us how this incredible, Nobel-winning discovery happened -- and what it might mean for our understanding of the universe. (In Spanish with English subtitles)

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More than 100 years after Albert Einstein predicted gravitational waves -- ripples in space-time caused by violent cosmic collisions -- LIGO scientists confirmed their existence using large, extremely precise detectors in Louisiana and Washington. Astrophysicist Gabriela González of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration tells us how this incredible, Nobel-winning discovery happened -- and what it might mean for our understanding of the universe. (In Spanish with English subtitles)

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This talk was presented at an official TED conference.

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Search for signals from stars in our galaxy with Einstein@Home, a program that uses your computer's idle time to search for gravitational waves from spinning isolated compact objects using data from the LIGO gravitational wave detector.

Help scientists at LIGO search for gravitational waves, the elusive ripples of spacetime, with Gravity Spy.

About the speaker

Gabriela González

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Gabriela González is part of the collaboration of more than 1,000 scientists who measured for the first time the gravitational waves that Einstein predicted over 100 years ago.

Learn more

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How do you build a real-world machine to test the most abstract of theories? Janna Levin talks with Rai Weiss, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics and one of the original designers of LIGO.

TED-Ed: "What are gravitational waves?"

In September 2015, scientists witnessed something never seen before: two black holes colliding. Both about 30 times as big as our Sun, they had been orbiting each other for millions of years. A fraction of a second before the crash, they sent a vibration across the universe at the speed of light that was picked up by the LIGO detector. What are these ripples in space? Amber L. Stuver explains.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference.

Read our curation guidelines.

Search for signals from stars in our galaxy with Einstein@Home, a program that uses your computer's idle time to search for gravitational waves from spinning isolated compact objects using data from the LIGO gravitational wave detector.

Help scientists at LIGO search for gravitational waves, the elusive ripples of spacetime, with Gravity Spy.

Gabriela González: How LIGO discovered gravitational waves -- and what might be next | TED Talk