On 11 February, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave observatory, or LIGO, announced it had spotted gravitational waves, the stretching and squeezing of space-time created by the movement of massive objects.
The announcement caused a sensation among physicists and astronomers across the world, and they are now gearing up to exploit this new window on the universe.
This particular signal, picked up by LIGO’s two observatories on 14 September 2015, was made by two black holes, each about 30 times the mass of the sun, colliding with each other. This immediately resolved one open question for astronomers: before the signal came in, the very existence of such black hole binaries was contested. Further observations could tell us more about exotic objects like neutron stars and supernovas.
But that’s just the beginning. Gravitational waves will allow us to explore fundamental physics and possibly even peer back to the universe’s earliest moments. Here are four mysteries of cosmology that may finally be solved in the era of gravitational wave astronomy.
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