Starts With A Bang #117 - Gravitational waves and the Universe

It might seem hard to fathom, but it hasn't even been ten full years since advanced LIGO, the gravitational wave observatories that brought us our very first successful direct detection, turned on for the very first time. In the time since, it's been joined by the Virgo and KAGRA detectors, and humanity is currently closing in on 300 confirmed gravitational wave detection events. What was an unconfirmed prediction of Einstein's General Relativity for a full century has now become one of the fastest-growing fields in all of astronomy and astrophysics.

Here in 2025, we're now looking forward to the LISA era: where we're going to build our first gravitational wave detectors in space. They'll have far longer baselines (i.e., separations between the various spacecrafts/stations) than any terrestrial gravitational wave detector, enabling us to detect fundamentally different classes (and masses) of objects that emit gravitational waves. At the same time, the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning is enabling us to detect and characterize ever greater numbers of gravitational wave events, an incredibly exciting development.

For this episode of the Starts With A Bang podcast, I'm so pleased to welcome Shaniya Jarrett to the program. She's here to guide us up to the frontiers and help us peer over the horizon, and is currently an astronomy PhD student at the University of Maryland after earning her Masters degree from the Fisk-Vanderbilt bridge program. Have a listen and learn all of the exciting science that's not only within our reach today, but that we all have to look forward to in the very near future!

(The image above shows an illustration of the three future LISA, or Laser Interferometer Space Antennae, spacecrafts, in a trailing orbit behind the Earth. LISA will be our first space-based gravitational wave detector, sensitive to objects thousands of times as massive than the ones LIGO can detect. Credit: University of Florida/NASA)