The Gravity Wave Hunter - Issue 34: Adaptation
▻http://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/the-gravity-wave-hunter
The celestial object came flying across the nighttime sky quickly, moving in an unusual pattern. Chiara Mingarelli and her friend saw it from a field in rural Ontario, their regular nighttime observation post. The interpretation was clear: Aliens. Her next step was also clear, which was to sprint home and explain to her parents her newly precarious position. She’d been caught staring at an alien spaceship. It’s childhood experiences like this one that laid the foundation for a lifetime love of astronomy. Today Mingarelli is still looking up into the sky, but much, much farther away. Her specialty is hunting for gravity waves, particularly those in the nanohertz frequency range (LIGO’s recent detection was of waves at a trillion times higher frequency). In her capacity as a Fellow at (...)