How multitalented Hinsdale South grad helped confirm Einstein's prediction
Scientists last week announced they have evidence that supports the theories that 1. Black holes exist and 2. Albert Einstein was right about his 1915 theory of relativity, and that the universe comprises space and time.
The detection last year of gravitational waves - for the first time - is what has physicists in a tizzy.
And one of the 900 or more people worldwide that helped figure this out is a member of the alternative band Draft Week who, eight years ago, was playing soccer, working on his tennis game and preparing to graduate from Hinsdale South High School.
Mike Zevin, a graduate student at Northwestern University in Evanston who is studying physics and astronomy at its Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics, said he still does all those activities, and he is grateful to be part of a team that made this discovery.
"It's a huge step. I consider it one of the most important discoveries in modern physics," Zevin said. "I feel like I was in the right place at the right time. There are a lot of people who deserve much more congratulations than I do. We just opened up a new field of astronomy and a new way of looking at our universe."
The Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics, or CIERA, researches how binary black holes form and analyzes data related to gravitational waves. It is part of the international LIGO, or Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, Scientific Collaboration. LIGO and the Virgo Collaboration published their research in Physical Review Letters, a journal of the American Physical Society.
Scientists believe black holes can be created when stars die. In a black hole, matter is squeezed together so tightly that gravity becomes so strong that even light cannot escape. Thus, a black hole cannot be seen. Its existence, scientists believe, can be determined by the actions of stars near it, compared to stars farther away.
Einstein suspected that black holes created gravitational waves, but thought we on Earth would never be able to detect or measure them.
But according to the paper published last week, gravitational waves were detected just three days after two detectors were turned back on after a five-year project to upgrade them. The detectors are in the states of Louisiana and Washington.
The LIGO team believes the waves were created by the merger of two black holes.
This merger bent the curvature of space time, creating waves big and powerful enough to be detected.
The detectors are in L-shaped buildings. Lasers shoot down each leg and are reflected back. The waves are detected by measuring the difference in the time it took for that to happen.
If there aren't any gravitational waves passing through, the times for each leg should be identical. But if a wave is passing through, it will lengthen one of the legs slightly, and the times will vary.
It had been predicted that only something as big as a collision or merger of two black holes could create a disturbance big enough to be felt here on Earth.
Zevin said the team first made the discovery in September 2015 but had to run a battery of tests to confirm the data was accurate.
He was a part of that process and said in the future, scientists hope to not only measure the collision of two massive black holes but also to eventually peer through a window to find out what the universe was like just seconds after the Big Bang occurred.
"It's a really exciting time to be part of this field," Zevin said. "We just opened up a new field of astronomy and a new way to look at our universe. We have a lot more data to analyze and hopefully a lot more signals to uncover. This is a huge discovery that's been awaited for a century. This is a big discovery."
Daily Herald staff writer Harry Hitzeman contributed to this article.