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National Academy of Sciences honors LIGO researchers

January 26th, 2017

The National Academy of Sciences announced today that LSU Professor of Physics and Astronomy Gabriela González is one of the recipients of the academy's 2017 Award for Scientific Discovery. González is currently the elected spokesperson for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, Scientific Collaboration, which includes the work of 90 institutions and more than 1,000 researchers around the globe. Since its establishment in 1997, the LSC spokesperson has led the organization that established and carried out the scientific program of LIGO. González has served as the LSC spokesperson for the past almost six years. She shares the award with former LSC spokespersons David Howard Reitze, executive director of the LIGO Laboratory at California Institute of Technology and a professor of physics at the University of Florida, and Peter R. Saulson, Martin A. Pomerantz '37 Professor of Physics at Syracuse University.

Saulson served as the first elected LSC spokesperson, filling a role first established by physics pioneer and LIGO co-founder Rainer "Rai" Weiss. Reitze succeeded him. Currently González is the longest serving elected LSC spokesperson.

The efforts of the award recipients combined 19 years of leadership paid off. In 2016, the LSC announced that it had observed gravitational waves from two colliding black holes, a collision that caused ripples in spacetime that could be measured on Earth. The observation, hailed as one of the most important scientific discoveries of 2016, proved the existence and properties of gravitational waves first predicted by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity a century earlier and capped a 60-year experimental quest involving thousands of researchers from around the world. More importantly, the detection of gravitational waves passing through Earth on Sept. 14, 2015 and then again on Dec. 26, 2015, started a new field of gravitational wave astronomy with many more discoveries to come.

Provided by Louisiana State University

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