Related Experiment Video
Updated: Sep 27, 2025

Femtosecond Laser Filaments for Use in Sub-Diffraction-Limited Imaging and Remote Sensing
Published on: April 25, 2019
The new frontier of gravitational waves
M Coleman Miller1,2, Nicolás Yunes3
1Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA. miller@astro.umd.edu.
Abstract:
In 2015, almost a century after Einstein published the general theory of relativity, one of its most important predictions was verified by direct detection: the production of gravitational waves in spacetime by accelerating objects. Since then, gravitational-wave astronomy has enabled tests of the nature of gravity and the properties of black holes, and in 2017 electromagnetic observations of a double neutron star merger producing gravitational waves led to a focus on multi-messenger astronomy. Here we review the history and accomplishments of gravitational-wave astronomy and look towards the future.
Related Concept Videos
Detection of Black Holes
Their closest cousins are neutron stars, which are composed almost entirely of neutrons packed against each other, making them extremely dense. A neutron star has the same mass as the Sun but its diameter is only a few kilometers. Therefore, the escape velocity from their surface is close to the speed of light.
Not until the 1960s, when the first neutron...
Schwarzschild Radius and Event Horizon
The minimum speed required to launch a projectile from the surface of an object to which it is gravitationally bound so that it eventually escapes the object’s gravitational field is called the escape velocity. The escape velocity is independent of the mass of the object. Merging the idea of escape...
The Principle of Superposition and the Gravitational Field
Standing Electromagnetic Waves
Suppose a sheet of a perfect conductor is placed in the yz-plane, and a linearly polarized electromagnetic wave traveling in the...
Space-Time Curvature and the General Theory of Relativity
This has been verified in many experiments. However, space and time are no longer absolute. Two observers moving relative to one another do not agree on the length of objects or the passage of time. The mechanics of objects based on Newton's laws of...
Gravitation Between Spherically Symmetric Masses

