“Where did all this come from? How did it all get started?”

These are the questions that Dr. Nergis Mavalvala asks in regards to the universe. It’s not the meaning-of-life stuff within the conventional sense, however extra of how all the pieces round us got here to be. These are the questions all of us have, however for Dr. Mavalvala, discovering the solutions is her life’s work. It’s why she turned a physicist.

“I began to understand that these questions are mostly answered outside of our planet, outside of our solar system,” she explains. “It really lies in the universe. And that’s how I got interested in astrophysics.”

As dean of MIT’s School of Science, Dr. Mavalvala has her fingers full together with her day-to-day duties, however she nonetheless has time for her past love: physics.

Black Holes Are More Important Than You Think

“When we look out into the universe, almost all the information we have gathered about the universe over millennia as humans and sentient beings is through light,” Dr. Mavalvala says. But black holes don’t give us gentle, she factors out. That makes them arduous to grasp. “A black hole is a good example of something that has so much gravity that even light can’t escape its gravitational pull. And how do you study those kinds of objects?”

The reply: gravitational waves.

“About 100 years ago, Einstein gave us a clue to that, which was that there were these objects called gravitational waves, which are essentially waves that are given off by objects because of their gravity,” she explains. “Because they’re really massive and they’re moving, they will cause waves in the spacetime itself.”

It was these ripples in spacetime that drew Dr. Mavalvala in, each the science behind them and the expertise that we’d should construct to detect them.

“If we want to answer the question of how our universe came to be and why we see the universe we do today, we have to understand things like black holes,” she says. “They’re important building blocks of the universe. If you want a complete picture of the world around us, then you need to use every messenger that nature provides. Gravitational waves are one such messenger, as is light.”

Detecting Gravitational Waves with LIGO

For a lot of Dr. Mavalvala’s profession, these gravitational waves—ripples in spacetime that consequence from collisions between large objects similar to black holes—had been theoretical.

“I got started with LIGO when I was a graduate student at MIT in the early 1990s,” Dr. Mavalvala says, referring to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory within the US. “The team of people who were working on it were seen as sort of a ragtag team of dreamers.” Her PhD adviser, Nobel laureate Dr. Rainer Weiss, was one of many founders of the venture, however lots of her graduate college colleagues warned her to not pursue this path. At the time, there was nonetheless some debate about whether or not gravitational waves even existed. “It was sort of a maverick science,” she explains. “And I have to say, in some ways, that was part of the draw, to be part of something so improbable.”