14 DAY TRIAL // A collaboration of researchers in the European Union announced today that it will be starting a new physics project, which will be aimed at discovering gravitational waves. The instrument will help scientists all over the world gain a better understanding of what happened after the Big Bang.
The moments immediately afterwards are of great interest to researchers, who say that weird states of matter and interesting elementary particles might have appeared and shortly afterwards disappear, at that time.
In the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, theoretical physicists say that the Universe had a lot more dimensions than the three we are used to today. All of those most likely collapsed onto one another, to form more stable ones, or are visible only on the tiniest of scales.
At the same time, the Universe spawned what experts know as gravitational waves. Predicted by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity, these waves are in fact nothing more than minute distortions in the fabric of spacetime.
However, checking to see whether these gravitational waves exist or not has been a daunting task for experts. Recently, the quest suffered another blow, when experts learned that NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) will no longer be able to collaborate on a gravitational wave detector.
As such, Europeans will go on on their own, but not in outer space. They want to build the aptly-named Einstein Telescope (ET) right here on Earth, at the European Gravitational Observatory site in Pisa, Italy. Designed were presented during a meeting held there today.
According to the earliest plans, the ET will be about 100 times more sensitive than any similar instrument in existence today. At this point, experts estimate that they can build the detector for less than a billion euro. The price tag is around $1.42 billion.
Since discovering primordial gravitational waves won't most likely be possible with the ET, experts want to focus their attention on merging black holes, collapsing stars and supernova explosions, which are all proposed as potential sources of spacetime ripples.
“An observatory achieving that level of sensitivity will turn [gravitational wave] detection into a routine astronomical tool. ET will lead a scientific revolution,” explains the scientific coordinator of the design study, Michele Punturo, quoted by Space.
He says that the design study was made possible by funding secured from the European Commission. The European executive body allotted $4.3 million (around 3 million euros) for this effort.
“With this grant, the European Commission recognized the importance of gravitational wave science as developed in Europe, its value for fundamental and technological research, provided a common framework for the European scientists involved in the gravitational wave search and allowed for a significant step towards the exploration of the Universe with a completely new enquiry instrument,” Federico Ferrini explains.
The expert is the director of the European Gravitational Observatory and also the project coordinator of the Einstein Telescope design study. Researchers from Japan and the United States also collaborated on the document.