The hunt for gravitational waves

The Independent : Last week at the British Science Festival , Alberto Vecchio , an astronomer at Birmingham University, gave a vivid description of what it would be like if we could detect gravitational waves. “Imagine you are in a pitch-dark room where an orchestra is playing, but your ears are covered. It would be terribly uninteresting as nothing seems to be happening. Then all of a sudden, you start hearing. There is a completely new view of that room. Every time we have looked at a different band of the sky we have discovered completely new things. The sky will be different,” Dr Vecchio said."Imagine pointing a telescope at colliding black holes. You would see absolutely nothing because black holes are, by definition, black. If you were to point a gravitational-wave observatory, it would be the most spectacular event,” he said.Dr Vecchio is one of about 800 scientists around the world who are part of an ambitious international attempt to detect gravitational waves using half a dozen different machines dotted around the world, from the US to Australia. All of these machines are in the process of being upgraded to make them even more sensitive to these elusive ripples in the fabric of space-time.