Breaking news of the detection of a gravitational wavelength spread like wildfire Thursday afternoon, when the National Science Foundation (NSF) put out a press conference in Washington. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) came across the discovery on September 14, 2015; it had been detected for the first time, 100 years after Einstein’s prediction. Playing a major role in this detection was Steven Penn, associate professor of physics at HWS.

“I am ecstatic,” Penn exclaimed during the showing of the NSF press conference in the Vandervort room. LIGO has opened new windows to the universe with the observation of ripples in the fabric of spacetime, called gravitational waves, from colliding black holes. This is the biggest event since Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity, confirming the prediction after 50 years of trial and error and 25 years spent perfecting a set of instruments sensitive enough to identify a distortion in spacetime a thousandth the diameter of one atomic nucleus across a 4 km strip of laser beam and mirror. Penn is currently the chair of the LIGO Science Collaboration (LSC)’s Coating Workshop Group, a subcommittee of the Optics Working Group, which is developing coating for future detectors.

Gravitational waves carry the information vital to understanding their dramatic origins and about the nature of gravity that cannot otherwise be obtained. Physicists from all over the world have come to the conclusion that the detected gravitational waves were produced during the final fraction of a second of the merger of two black holes to produce a single, more massive spinning black hole. This will be the first time that a collision of two black holes has been observed. The LIGO Observatories are funded by the NSF, and were conceived, built and are operated by Caltech and MIT.

Penn first began with LSC research on the mirror design for advanced LIGO. What he found was how to significantly reduce the thermal noise in the material fused silica, which led to the selection of fused silica for the Advanced LIGO mirror substrates and suspensions.

“We have detected gravitational waves. We did it,” said David Reitz, executive director of LIGO, during Thursday’s press conference, “This is the most sensitive experiment ever produced by humans.”

The announcement is what Penn calls a “scientific love.” A co-author of the Physical Review Letters article announcing the detection, he joined the LSC in 1998 while a postdoctoral fellow at Syracuse University. HWS was one of the first small colleges to join the LSC in 2002. “Our first observation of gravitational waves has been incredibly exciting, and it justifies all of our hard work on Advanced LIGO. We would never have seen this event with Initial LIGO.”

Penn was a member of the team that originally determined the course of the coating noise and that later developed the coating used for Advanced LIGO. The Coating Group is made up of research groups from the University of Glasgow, Stanford University, American University, University of Florida, University of the West of Scotland, Caltech, University of Sannio, Whitman College, Cal State Fullerton, National Tsing Hua University, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

“This has taken a long time, a long journey,” said Gabrielle Gonzalez, spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaborative, who adds that they will be adding more detectors (hopefully) in Japan and India. “We will begin listening to the Universe.” The further implications of this discovery include more collaborative work within the LIGO group. Reitz says, “This is a scientific moonshot.”

Furthermore, Penn has imparted his research into the physics courses he is teaching at HWS and in his lab in the basement of Eaton Hall. He urges students interested in the physics field to take on research positions and get involved in the work as soon as possible.

President Gearan made closing remarks at the viewing commending Penn on his work and voicing appreciation of his “discipline and scholar.” Penn was posed the question, “What’s the probability of another event?” He paused and answered, “We don’t know yet. This is just the beginning.”