A decade after the detection of the first gravitational wave, the story of one of the main protagonists of the scientific adventure that has forever changed astronomy.
In September 2015, the American instrument LIGO detected a gravitational wave for the first time–a perturbation in space-time predicted by Einstein a century earlier. The wave was produced by the merger of two black holes over a billion light-years away. In 2017, the European experiment Virgo joined LIGO, enabling the precise localization of sources, in particular the historic neutron star merger of August 17, 2017.
In addition to confirming Einstein’s theory of general relativity, this signal marks the beginning of a new era in astronomy, where a completely different cosmic messenger is used to try to answer questions in astrophysics, cosmology, and fundamental physics–an ongoing quest that never ceases to amaze.