The news of scientists seeing ripples in the fabric of spacetime, known as gravitational waves and theorised by physicist Albert Einstein 100 years ago, has sent waves of excitement through the physics world, including talks of a Nobel Prize. The news is seen as a new tool for helping to understand the universe.

CSU’s Dr Philip Charlton worked through copious amounts of audible data to play a key role in the astronomy discovery.

“Gravitational waves are really, really weak,” Dr Charlton said.

“Someone at the presentation said it’s like trying to detect a change in distance of the width of a human hair between here and the nearest star.”

Dr Charlton worked at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) for about five years from 2000.

He came back to work for CSU in Wagga from 2005, but continued doing data analysis for LIGO.

He said LIGO was born in the 1990s when physicists Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss and Ron Drever started the project, but had to go through a number of stages and wait for technological advances to develop the accuracy needed to observe gravitational waves.

The discovery confirms a major prediction of Einstein's 1915 general theory of relativity and opens an unprecedented new window onto the cosmos.

Dr Charlton said the discovery opened a new window on the universe.

“In the same way that radio astronomy led to the discovery of the cosmic microwave background, the ability to 'see' in the gravitational wave spectrum will likely lead to unexpected discoveries,” he said.

Dr Charlton said if you imagine space as being like a very stiff material and very resistant to being bent. It would take a lot of mass to bend it. 

“But when you have a couple of large masses like two black holes spinning around each other, they can cause space to bend like a wave.”

He said a wave travelled through spacetime, from the two black holes merging, and travels like a ripple eventually getting to Earth, which causes a jiggle in the tool used specifically to find this phenomenon.