There is a long-standing myth that a scientist is a fusty, stubborn old man, refusing the believe the exciting new result because it would mean that he was wrong. But is that really true?
In 2015, astronomers began to study the universe in a brand-new way. Instead of using light from the cosmos, the Advanced LIGO and Virgo observatories detected gravitational waves, tiny ripples in space (when a gravitational wave goes through you, you get stretched and squeezed).
Ideally, we’d combine these new measurements with our ‘traditional’ approach of studying light from space, to really maximise how much we can learn.
This is really tough — we can’t tell where gravitational waves come from with any accuracy — but scientists, including myself and colleagues at the University of Leicester are working hard to combine gravitational wave measurements with the more normal measurements of light from space.
We were at the forefront when light and gravitational waves were first measured from the same object, in 2017. This is a video the university did to accompany their PR about this result.
But even on their own, gravitational waves are challenging what we thought we knew about extreme conditions in space.
In September 2020 the LIGO/Virgo team announced the detection of two black holes merging. Two impossible black holes.
They were both more than 65 times the mass of our Sun, but our current understanding tells us that black holes that big can’t exist: the parent star would be completely obliterated by its supernova explosion leaving nothing behind, certainly no black hole. Apparently, our current understanding has some explaining to do.
But here’s the thing: scientists are not all shaking their heads, stubbornly refusing to believe the data. Rather, we’re jumping up and down like excited kids saying, “Ooh, a new mystery! Something we can’t explain properly yet. Awesome! Let’s see if we can work it out.”
Whether we get the answers quickly or slowly I can’t guess, but when the universe throws us a curveball, and shows us how and where our current understanding is wrong, well, that’s why we do the job.
Oh, and by the way, astronomers don’t normally wear lab coats either, in case you were wondering.
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