Capturing Gravitational Waves In Space, Is It Possible?

The European Space Agency (ESA) recently announced that it successfully experimented a new technology that would allow scientists to build a spacecraft that can detect gravitational waves in outer space.

The team working on the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) Pathfinder mission is seeking to prove that gravitational wave-detecting space observatory can viably operate in space conditions.

"At the precision reached by LISA Pathfinder, a full-scale gravitational wave observatory in space would be able to detect fluctuations caused by the mergers of supermassive black holes in galaxies anywhere in the Universe," Karsten Danzmann, the co-principal investigator of the LISA Technology Package as quoted by Popular Science.

The scientific breakthrough excited the scientific community who saw the discovery as an important milestone in laying the foundations for the creation of a so-called a "gravitational map" of the universe that would allow scientists to study hidden cosmic entities and celestial events.

"The frequency band that LISA will observe is rich with signals from different kinds of astrophysical and cosmological sources. We will observe the signals from merging black holes at the centers of galaxies...the almost sinusoidal signals from compact binary systems in our galaxies, and possibly the stochastic ripples from the Big Bang itself," wrote LISA Pathfinder senior scientist Martin Hewitson on Reddit AMA.

To test the viability of a free fall technology needed to create an operational space observatory, the mission built a small test space vehicle which was launched in December last year to find out if two objects can be in constant free fall.

Maintaining two objects in free fall would require complete motionlessness. Interestingly, ESA proved that they managed to reach this near-perfect state of free fall. They also managed to diminish the amount of external forces acting on the objects inside the spacecraft as published in the Physical Review Letters.

"With LISA Pathfinder, we have created the quietest place known to humankind. Its performance is spectacular and exceeds all our expectations by far," Karsten Danzmann, the co-principal investigator of the LISA Technology Package as quoted by SPACE. "Only by reducing and eliminating all other sources of disturbance could we observe the most perfect free fall ever created."