Science superstar LIGO near Richland draws crowd

For years, Fred Raab, the head of LIGO at Hanford, got the same question during tours of the observatory, which started searching for gravitational waves in 2002.

“What have you seen?”

The answer was always “nothing, yet.”

Until Saturday.

A couple hundred people showed up for the regular second Saturday tour of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory north of Richland after news broke Thursday that gravitational waves had been detected for the first time.

Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in his general theory of relativity in 1916, but none had been detected until Sept. 14. The Hanford LIGO detected them seven milliseconds after they traveled past a twin LIGO in Louisiana.

Jason Jones of Seattle drove 200 miles to tour the observatory and hear about the detection of gravitational waves that passed through the Earth after the collision of two massive black holes 1.3 billion years ago.

“I’m in awe of the science that happened in this place,” he said. “It could fundamentally change our view of reality.”

Gravitational waves give scientists a new way to examine the very essence of space and time, Raab said.

“What we have done for the first time is build a receiver that can receive and measure space quakes,” he said. “Humanity now has a new way to explore the universe around us … and discover things that are inconceivably different that the world we live in.”

Optical astronomy tells us there are only three dimensions, he said. But maybe there are more.

“There are very, very deep mysteries we don’t know,” he said.

You don’t have to be a scientist to be mesmerized by the possibilities of what gravitational waves might reveal, Jones said.

Dana Mohr of Benton City came on the tour to learn more after driving school buses with Hanford High students out to see the observatory, which includes 2.5-mile-long vacuum tubes stretching across the desert. A gravitational wave can cause the barest change in the length of the tubes.

“I love that it’s in our backyard,” she said. “This is a huge scientific discovery.”

Many who could not wait to tour the observatory were scientists.

New college graduate Molly Kelly-Gorham recently started a job at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland. She’d attended a lecture on the search for gravitational waves as a student at the University of Massachusetts.

“I’m glad Einstein was proved right,” she said. “It’s pretty sweet.”

Xiaofei Yu of China, who has been visiting PNNL on an exchange for battery research, said he did not believe the news when he first heard it this week.

A TV crew from China is expected at LIGO in a few days, and a crew from Brazil already has arrived.

The Hanford and Louisiana LIGOs started up in late summer after a major upgrade to significantly increase their sensitivity. Only about a third of the data has been analyzed from their maiden runs. When the next runs start, their instruments should be even more sensitive.

There are many more discoveries to come, Raab said.

For a ticket to attend a March 12 celebration and tour at Hanford LIGO, email outreach@ligo-wa.caltech.edu with a first and second choice of time from 11 a.m., 12:30 p.m., 2 p.m., 3:30 p.m. and 5 p.m., plus the license plate number of the car you will be driving.

This story was originally published February 13, 2016 at 9:03 PM with the headline "Science superstar LIGO near Richland draws crowd."