Gravitationswellen

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discoverers of gravitational waves is the achievement of more than a thousand researchers who together succeeded in this detection. Physicist Hartmut Grote of the German gravitational wave detector GEO600 was involved in the century-long discovery and tells its story firsthand. Gravitational waves are produced by all accelerated bodies, by the explosion of stars or the merging of two black holes as well as by the start of a car. Incredibly tiny, they compress and stretch space. Now we can use them to explore the universe independently of light. A new age of astronomy has begun.