A Brief History of Gravitational Waves, and the Gravitational-Wave Antennas

  • 1916: Albert Einstein described gravity in his Theory of General Relativity as ripples in “space-time”

  • 1972: MIT’s Dr. Rainer Weiss proposed a Gravitational Wave (GW) instrument

  • 1974: The National Science Foundation's (NSF's) Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico discovered a binary pulsar, the first proof of the existence of GWs

  • 1980: The NSF began funding Caltech and MIT to begin laser interferometer research and development

  • 1989: The LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatories) construction proposal was approved by the National Science Board (NSB), which envisioned 40-meter prototypes followed by advanced interferometers

  • 1993: Virgo project approved by the French CNRS  (National Centre for Scientific Research)

  • 1994: Virgo project approved by the Italian INFN (National Institute for Nuclear Physics)

  • 1994: LIGO Hanford Observatory construction began

  • 1995: LIGO Livingston Observatory construction began

  • 1997: Virgo Observatory construction began

  • 2007: Agreement reached for data analysis collaboration of the LIGO and Virgo antennas

  • 2008: Advanced LIGO construction began

  • 14 September 2015: the 2 LIGO observatories together detected ripples in space-time from the merger of two black holes 1.3 billion light-years away, thus confirming Einstein's prediction

  • 14 August 2017: the Virgo and the 2 LIGO observatories together detected gravitational waves from a binary neutron star merger in a galaxy 130 million light-years away

  • 3 October 2017: Nobel Prize in Physics announced, with one half to Rainer Weiss, the other half jointly to Kip S. Thorne and Barry C. Barish, "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves"

  • 4 October 2019: Announcement that Japan's KAGRA (KAmioka GRAvitational Wave Detector) will join LIGO and Virgo in the hunt for GWs

  • 3 March 2020: KAGRA began making real-time observations in its quest to detect GWs