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On September 15, more than 100 community members attended three lectures at Triton College to discover how gravitational waves can help scientists better understand black holes.
Rob Owen, Associate Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Oberlin College, presented the lectures as part of Triton's Big Bang Event Series.
"Part of the mission is to bring in experts from different fields so that our community members can be directly exposed," said Johnathan Nelson, a planetarium educator at Triton's Cernan Earth and Space Center.
The science itself, Owen said, is similar to a discussion.
"A lot of science is published in a manual, and we think it's frozen," he said. "A better way to understand science is to think of it as a conversation."
Owen focused his first part of his lecture on the scientists whose work has made today's discoveries possible.
Isaac Newton, Charles-Augustin Coulomb, James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein discovered the properties and laws of forces that act on physical objects using mathematical equations to describe them.
Einstein was the first scientist to make assumptions about gravitational waves, defined as excited waves that cross gravitational fields when massive objects are accelerated or disturbed.
The measurement of gravitational waves remained unresolved until 2015, when the Observatory of gravitational waves at the laser interferometer detected them, announcing their discovery in the world on February 11, 2016.
Owen has described black holes as the most compact thing in the universe. As scientists can measure gravitational waves, they can learn more about them. Scientists must not be able to see objects such as black holes to learn their properties.
"They give us a whole new way of thinking about astronomy," Owen said.
Nelson agreed. "In a way, we opened our eyes to a new type of astronomy for the first time," he said.
Owen remembers very well when LIGO scientists announced that they had found two black holes. He gave a lecture on gravitational waves and switched to a live video stream of the LIGO press conference.
After waiting 20 years for such a discovery, "it did not surprise me, it shocked me and hit me emotionally," Owen said.
For years, black holes have fascinated scientists and the public. They are in science fiction books and movies such as "Interstellar," a 2014 film that Owen's mentor, Kip Thorne, has reviewed for his scientific accuracy.
"They are hard to understand, but they also have unique properties that are so out of the realm that we are used to being exciting," said Nelson about black holes.
Kassady Ramirez, 10, said she learned about the existence of black holes in the school.
"Black holes are interesting where things happen when they fall into the black hole," said Kassidy.
She attended Owen's evening lecture, learning "when two black holes collide, they make one."
"There is a big black hole in the center of our galaxy, huge in size but even bigger in mass," Owen said.
He described how if the sun was a black hole, it would be four miles across, while if the earth was a black hole, it would only be about an inch in diameter.
After his afternoon conference, some people stayed for an hour to ask questions and learn more.
"The [term] "Black hole" is not universally used, "said Owen, for example, they are called" frozen stars "in Russia.
The LIGO has also found evidence of collisions with neutron stars, which have been at the origin of gold and platinum.
"Your alliance was once a neutron star before it crashed against another neutron star," he said.
The discoveries are still in progress. In the mid-2030s, the spatial interferometric laser antenna is designed to find answers to more mysteries of an expanding universe by detecting gravitational waves.
"This conversation that started with Newton is still ongoing and will continue for decades," said Owen.
People can learn more at www.black-holes.org.
Rachel K. Hindery is an independent reporter for Pioneer Press.
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