© 2025 Milwaukee Public Media is a service of UW-Milwaukee's College of Letters & Science
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Exploring UWM's role in the discovery of gravitational waves 10 years ago

A depiction of gravitational waves
Courtesy of the LIGO collaboration.
UW-Milwaukee physics and astronomy assistant professor Lia Medeiros explains gravitational waves and the role UWM played in discovering them.

It’s been just over a decade since physicists first detected gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time caused by cosmic collisions of black holes and neutron stars. Albert Einstein predicted their existence 100 years earlier, and the sighting confirmed his theory of gravity — commonly known as E = mc2.

UW-Milwaukee scientists played a major role in the discovery by processing massive amounts of data from the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) network of telescopes. Their work even contributed to the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Black holes colliding to produce gravitational waves.
Courtesy of the LIGO collaboration
The first ever sighting of two black holes colliding to produce gravitational waves, observed by LIGO telescopes on Sept. 15, 2015.

"Since then we've learned so much about gravity itself — but also so much about the kinds of black holes that are out there, what their mass distributions are, how frequently they merge, how they grow, how they evolve," says UWM physics and astronomy assistant professor Lia Medeiros.

The gravitational wave sighting also paved the way for recent discoveries by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which Medeiros has been involved with for years.

"We published the first image of a black hole on April 10 of 2019, and then we published the first ever image of the black hole at the center of our own galaxy in 2022," she says. "And I was very involved in both of those results."

Today this work continues in our own backyard through UWM's Center for Gravitation, Cosmology & Astrophysics (CGCA).

"We're effectively using black holes in space as a really extreme laboratory to test our most fundamental physics theories, which again is incredibly powerful, incredibly exciting, and not something that we were able to do just a few years ago," Medeiros says.

To dive deeper into the mysteries of outer space, you can check out CGCA's "Searching for Life in the Universe" event Wednesday, October 15 at the UWM Chemistry building. You can visit this link for tickets and more information.

Doors for the event open at 6:30.
Courtesy of the Leonard E. Parker Center for Gravitation, Cosmology and Astrophysics.
Doors for the event open at 6:30.

_

Audrey is a WUWM host and producer for Lake Effect.
Graham Thomas is a WUWM digital producer.
Related Content