UPDATE: Richland scientists part of Nobel Prize team, proving Einstein’s theory

The mood was ebullient at the Hanford LIGO observatory near Richland on Tuesday.

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics went to three physicists key to the development of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory at Hanford and its twin in Louisiana, after the LIGO observatories detected signals about one-thousandth the size of a proton.

The LIGOs had measured movements made by gravitational waves that were created in the last fifth of a second as two black holes spiraling together collided. The gravitational waves had traveled for 1.3 billion years to reach the Earth in September 2015.

Their detection confirmed predictions Albert Einstein made 100 years earlier about the fabric of space and time, opening up a new way to study the universe.

The winners of the Nobel Prize were three professors emeritus at the two institutions, California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that came together to design and build the U.S. LIGO observatories with funding from the National Science Foundation.

The three scientists credited those who worked at the two LIGO observatories in the United States and the Virgo observatory in Italy.

“It is unfortunate that, due to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, the prize has to go to no more than three people, when our marvelous discovery is the work of more than a thousand,” said Kip Thorne, a theoretical physics professor emeritus at Caltech, and now a Nobel laureate.

“The prize rightfully belongs to the hundreds of LIGO scientists and engineers who built and perfected our complex gravitational-wave interferometers, and the hundreds of LIGO and Virgo scientists who found the gravitational-wave signals in LIGO’s noisy data and extracted the waves’ information,” he said.

The prize also went to Barry Barish, Caltech physics professor emeritus, and Rainer Weiss, MIT physics professor emeritus.

The physics breakthrough made the LIGO project an advance favorite for the prize.

Michael Landry, head of the LIGO Hanford observatory, said he was working late Monday so he decided to stay up and watch the webcast announcement at 2:45 a.m.

Staff at the Hanford LIGO were not only happy about the recognition of the three key scientists, but also “extremely pleased with the attention on this field of physics and that people are excited about gravitational wave physics,” Landry said.

Fred Raab checked the New York Times first thing when he got up Tuesday morning.

“I was overjoyed,” said Raab, of the Tri-Cities, the associate director for LIGO Laboratory, which operates the two U.S. observatories.

He also was relieved because the founders in the field are now in their late 70s and early 80s. He wanted to make sure they were honored with the international prize that is awarded only to the living.

The development of exquisitely sensitive instrumentation for LIGO took four decades and pushed the capacity of imagination, said Thomas Rosenbaum, Caltech president.

It is a compelling story of dedication and perseverance rewarded on a project that once seemed impossible, Raab said.

He paraphrased the words he had remembered from President John F. Kennedy about the national effort to land a man on the moon, saying “we choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

Since the first direct detection of gravitational waves was made in 2015, gravitational waves have been detected three more time, each from the merger of black holes.

In the one announced just last week, black holes with masses about 31 and 25 times the mass of our sun merged, producing a spinning hole with about 53 times the mass of the sun. The remaining three solar masses converted into gravitational-wave energy.

The waves created ripples through time and space, stretching objects in one direction and compressing them in the other as they passed through.

For the LIGO at Hanford, that meant that one of the 2.5-mile-long vacuum tubes that stretches across the shrub-steppe landscape stretched longer and the second 2.5-mile vacuum tube at a right angle was compressed. The movement was so small that it would take 10 trillion such movements to equal the width of a human hair.

The detections have been a remarkable confirmation of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which was made at a time when goods were delivered to market by horse-drawn carts, Raab said. Einstein predicted gravitational waves existed, but thought they would be too weak to ever be detected.

Recent advances in lasers, optics and digital controls have made the LIGO detections possible, said Barish at a news conference.

The success of LIGO provides a new set of tools to investigate the most extreme states of matter, Raab said. Scientists are anticipating detection of neutron stars.

The stars have matter packed so tightly that a sugar-cube amount of material could weigh as much as Mount Everest, according to NASA.

Previously, all astronomy observations have relied mostly on light, including X-rays and radio waves, or on very high energy particles called neutrinos and cosmic rays.

Now, astronomers can learn about cosmic objects through quivers they make in space and time, Caltech said in a statement.

The real goal is to use the Hanford and Louisiana LIGOs, Virgo and other observatories being developed in India and Japan to find something completely unexpected, Landry said. The field of astrophysics could be pushed in a new direction.

“If we can find black holes, I’m confident there are new things out there we have not had the imagination to dream up,” he said.

This story was originally published October 3, 2017 at 12:41 PM with the headline "UPDATE: Richland scientists part of Nobel Prize team, proving Einstein’s theory."