“It is certainly the discovery of the century. We have been searching for this detection for 100 years. It will be in the books: it is the beginning of the Era of Gravitational Wave Astronomy.” This is what Professor Anderson Fauth, from the Physics Institute (IFGW) at Unicamp, commented on the Nobel Prize in Physics, announced on Tuesday (3). The prize was awarded to researchers Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip S. Thorne who managed to prove the existence of gravitational waves, predicted by Albert Einstein in 1915, in his General Theory of Relativity.
According to Fauth, the discovery will have impacts on society as a whole. Firstly, it will be felt in the theoretical spheres of knowledge production, influencing studies in the most diverse areas. In the medium and long term, the expectation is for radical transformations in the direction of technological innovation. “When physics makes a discovery of this magnitude, the impact is for all of humanity,” he said.
Fauth compared the detection to the discovery of electromagnetic waves, which today permeate our daily lives in the technologies of cell phones, GPSs, etc. But he points out that gravitational waves are not as easy to manipulate as electromagnetic waves. “These are phenomena with enormous energy dimensions, involving bodies with tens of times the mass of the Sun and in situations of collapse,” he explained.
The gravitational waves detected by North American researchers were generated by the collision of two black holes 1,3 billion years ago. Using an extremely sensitive technique called laser interferometry, with structures more than three kilometers long, located in three laboratories, positioned in different parts of the globe, gravitational waves could be detected directly for the first time.
The experimental process for detecting gravitational waves was initiated in the 1960s by Joseph Weber, who proposed bar resonance instruments. These instruments provided indirect detections, which, although they were considered strong evidence of the existence of gravitational waves, were not yet proof of their existence.
With laser interferometry and improved technology, the very existence of gravitational waves ended up being called into question. “The detectors were already so sensitive that speculation began that they might not exist,” said Fauth.
The international cooperation that made the discovery possible should be intensified in the coming years with the construction of two other laser interferometry laboratories in India and Japan. Furthermore, the IFGW professor points to a tendency for studies in the area to converge. “Each technique detects one part of the information, but does not see another. They all have limitations. The source that generates gravitational waves must also generate particles, accelerate particles, generate electromagnetic waves... These other phenomena can be seen using other techniques. These different techniques now tend to converge”, he pointed out.
In Brazil
Since 2001, the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe), with funding from the São Paulo State Research Support Foundation (Fapesp), has been developing a Brazilian project to detect gravitational waves. IFGW participates in the project in the area of cosmic ray detection, so that they do not present themselves as noise in the detection of gravitational waves. “There is constant radiation from cosmic rays and gravitational wave detectors are sensitive to them. The cosmic ray detector works as a vet to know whether the signal perceived is really gravitational waves, or noise due to the passage of cosmic rays”, explained Fauth.
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