Being born raised and currently living in California, people ask me all the time if I'm able to surf. Unfortunately, no, I don't know how to surf. But the waves that are crashing ashore here on Earth are not the only ones in the universe, and they may be very mysterious. This is your space pod for November 6, 2015. You may have heard of these kinds of waves before. They're called gravitational waves, and they manipulate the universe in an ever so subtle way. No, they're not Matthew McConaughey stuck behind your bookcase, and no, they are not a new idea. Their inception begins nearly a century ago. Gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein, thanks to his theory of general relativity, which we'll cover in a space pod later this month. Gravitational waves theoretically transport energy in the form of gravitational radiation, and there's a very straightforward result from the expected passing of one, an oscillation of particles as they follow the ripple of space time from the gravitational wave. The effects on the observable space in which this occurs would be negligible if any at all. These oscillations would be extremely small. We're talking in order of magnitude smaller than the individual subatonic particles that make up atoms, like a proton. Even though they may be waves in space time itself, they still hold the same properties like actual waves do, such as amplitude, frequency, wavelength, and speed. There's a few things that we predict should generate gravitational radiation, spinning objects orbiting each other like a star around a planet, a non-acermetrical planetoid that's rotating, basically a spinning lumpy object, and a supernovas explosion will also radiate gravitational radiation. One of the big problems with gravitational waves is detecting them. You have to design systems that can pick up on those small oscillations and tell whether it's a gravitational wave or a truck five miles away on the freeway near your detector. Let's take a look by figuring out the gravitational radiation generated from the interaction of the Earth orbiting the Sun. When the numbers are crunched, our interaction of Earth orbiting the Sun generates a wave with an amplitude of about 10 to the negative 26th. This means that waves affect particles by oscillating them by one part in 10 to the 26th power. This is, as you can imagine, staggeringly small. In fact, it's beyond the theoretical limits of just about any potential gravitational wave detector that we could build. As you can gather from this, the first gravitational waves that we would expect to find would be from the most energetic events in the universe, like ultra-massive supernovae, or really big black holes spiraling in on each other, or even the most energetic event in the universe itself, the big bang. In fact, in early 2014, a team from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics found exactly that, the gravitational waves of the big bang. Once and for all, proving cosmic inflation and resulting in our first detection of gravitational waves. Then the process of peer review began. This is when you release your data and methods to other scientists to try it out and see whether you really did everything correctly, or if maybe you missed a little bit, or in this case, maybe you announced your results before the peer review process, which is an extremely big no-no. Uh-oh, Doggonna didn't think about that. Turns out that they didn't find gravitational waves or cosmic inflation. Just dust in our own galaxy. Earlier this year in January, the team officially retracted their results. But that's okay. We have several gravitational wave detectors in operation right now. By far, the most sensitive of them happens to be the most well-known, the laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory. Ligo. Ligo doesn't use telescopes in order to see gravitational waves, but it does use light. Fire in a laser in a vacuum chamber that extends down four kilometers in two different directions. That laser beam travels the distance 75 times before returning to a recombination spot together. A gravitational wave would stretch one of those arms before the other, meaning one laser beam would take longer than expected to return to the recombination spot, thusly detecting a passing wave. Over that distance, Ligo should be able to detect gravitational waves as small as 10 to the 18th power, one part per 10 to the 18th, which is about the size of the largest gravitational waves we'd expect to experience here on Earth. To give you an idea of how big one part per 10 to the 18th power is, it's roughly 1,000th the diameter of a proton. During its years of operation, it didn't detect a wave, but the expectation at that level of resolution was maybe one wave every few decades. Although over the past few years, Ligo wasn't operating because it's being upgraded to what they're now calling advanced Ligo. Advanced Ligo operates with four times the resolution and a sensitivity 10 times greater. The expectation is that advanced Ligo, once up and fully running, should be able to detect tens of gravitational waves annually, but we'll have to await the initial data as it's first run is just now starting up. Thanks for watching this space pod. I'm Jared Head. What do you think about gravitational waves and the ways to detect them? We'll tell us below in the comments, and don't forget to like and subscribe to us on social media. We also do have a Patreon campaign where if you've got a little extra, go ahead and hand it over to us and we'll bring the universe and its infinite mysteries to everyone who may want to view. So, until the next space pod, keep exploring.