Athens Observatory Involved With Huge Gravitational Wave Project

The National Observatory of Athens and a cluster of Greek universities have announced an important collaboration regarding the construction of spacecraft that will reportedly “chase” the traces of space-time and examine gravitational waves.

In 2015, the two enormous interferometers of the LIGO Observatory in Lousiana and Washington observed a startling phenomenon: a gravitational wave, that passed through the Earth, causing the whole thing to oscillate subtly, but undeniably.

Over a century since Einstein’s theoretical formulation of the gravitational wave phenomenon and only nine years after its demonstration, the European Space Agency (ESA) has announced the launch of the ground-breaking LISA mission, in collaboration with NASA, the first scientific push to detect and study gravitational waves from space. The National Observatory of Athens also takes part in the scheme and in solving important challenges included.

LISA will comprise three spacecraft spaced 2.5 million kilometers apart and will follow the Earth in its orbit around the sun, forming a stable, equilateral triangle. The three craft will exchange laser beams producing a huge interferometer capable of detecting gravitational waves from a multitude of sources.

Construction work will start in January 2025 and will require major technological innovations at all levels, while the launch is planned for 2037. The Greek National Observatory of Athens, along with the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the National Kapodistrian University of Athens, the Technology and Research Foundation, the University of Ioannina, the University of Patras, and the Democritus University of Thrace, are all participating in the consortium.

“The whole program has a number of technical difficulties, from getting these craft into space, keeping them at a constant distance to each other to within a millionth of a millionth of a meter and orbiting the Sun precisely to how we’re going to get to Earth with laser beams, thousands of terabytes of information”, Manos Saridakis, main researcher of the National Observatory of Athens, PhD in Nuclear Physics of the EKPA, told Naftemporiki.

What will the National Observatory of Athens Contribute to the Gravitational Wave Project?

Throughout the duration of the project, the National Observatory of Athens will contribute in the field of theory, investigating how spacecraft will operate in space, in the processing of data, using artificial intelligence, and in the calibration of space devices.

The LISA program is currently in the testing phase, in which researchers are facing challenges – the main one being the transfer and processing of large amounts of data. Which concerns the optimal mode of communication, referring to the transfer of data with lasers, in order to transmit several terabytes of information per hour.

Mr Saridakis explained what gravitational waves are to Naftempoiki, stating “If I make an asymmetric movement, I produce gravitational waves, but these are unimaginably small. To see them we must have massive bodies and these are black holes and secondarily neutron stars. So when we have two black holes, orbiting each other, in the final stages of their merger, a gravitational wave is produced, which travels throughout the universe and reaches Earth.”