9 September 2020

Gravitational waves are disturbances in the geometry of space-time that propagate through space at the speed of light. In the universe, gravitational waves are created when two massive objects, such as black holes or neutron stars, merge. These waves are created by the outward radiation of gravitational energy as these celestial bodies rotate in very tight orbits. A gravitational wave was first detected by the LIGO experiment, which is still ongoing in the United States and other regions of the world. Since then, with improved detector sensitivity, many new sources of gravitational waves have been discovered in space, some of them remnants of massive cataclysms that occurred far away and long ago. If such cataclysms occurred in our galaxy, the consequences would be tragic for humanity. Our galaxy is full of massive black holes, but the closest ones are located at a safe distance from our planet. The existence of gravitational waves was predicted by Albert Einstein in the early 20th century. Gravity is a universal force that originates in the very structure of matter and is inextricably linked to it. The question is how gravity functions on the largest scale, where gravitational interaction is limited to the speed of light. However, objects such as galaxies are hundreds of thousands of light-years across, and I personally don't understand how a gravitational field operates on the scale of these objects. All fields are nothing more than information transmitted through space, sometimes over very large distances. The gravitational field carries information about the curvature of space-time by mass, telling stars and their planetary systems how to move within the galaxy. However, if this information propagates at a speed as slow as the speed of light (of course, we're talking about speeds on cosmic scales), how did all the galaxies manage to form in the first place, whether into spiral, Seyfert, or elliptical galaxies? These processes, it's known, took millions of years. They were, of course, formed from cosmic dust and gas (hydrogen), but I haven't yet encountered any satisfactory analyses of galaxy evolution. Gravitational waves originate from distant regions of the universe; their increased detection frequency will allow for a more thorough understanding of the universe's structure and a more accurate estimate of its age and geometry.