During winter semester, all the students chose one of two classes:
1) SCOM-5076 (Communicating Science Through Exhibits)
2) SCOM-5106 (Communicating through Traditional Media)
The majority of my cohort picked Traditional Media, but I and four others went with Exhibits. Since the goal of Exhibits was to design an exhibit for Science North, our classes were held at the science center.
During our first class January 11, six Staff Scientists—each in charge of a different area of Science North—presented their exhibit concepts as potentials for further development. The concept that most piqued my interest came from Olathe MacIntyre, Staff Scientist of Space Place. MacIntyre hoped to design an exhibit explaining gravitational waves to visitors, so I and one other girl chose this to be our semester-long project.
Gravitational waves first made headlines in February 2016, when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced they had observed gravitational waves for the first time in September 2015. Gravitational waves are waves in the fabric of space-time, created when the gravity wells of massive objects, like black holes and neutron stars, interact with each other.
Henri Poincaré first proposed this phenomenon in 1905, and Albert Einstein subsequently predicted it in 1916, on the basis of his general theory of relativity. While gravitational waves can be hundreds of kilometers in length, their amplitudes are very small, on the scale of a proton, making it difficult for scientists to detect them. To overcome this difficulty, scientists use a device called an interferometer, a device that uses beams of light to measure small changes in distance. | These two neutron stars create gravitational waves when they circle each other. Image courtesy NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. |
While LIGO is still at work to detect more gravitational waves, the European Space Agency is considering a project called LISA, which would do measurements in space rather than from Earth. The advantage of this project would be that LISA’s three spacecraft would form an equilateral triangle with an arm’s length of about 3 million miles (5 million km), instead of just 2.5 miles (4 km) long, which would allow for much more sensitive measurements. | LIGO near Livingston, Louisiana. Photo courtesy Caltech/MIT/LIGO Lab. |
After looking through YouTube, we came across this awesome "wave table" demonstration: