Last week's announcement that physicists had finally observed gravitational waves — nearly imperceptible ripples in space that scientists had long been searching for — had a humble beginning.
On September 14, 2015, 33-year-old Marco Drago was at his desk at the Max Planck Institute in Hanover, Germany, chatting with a colleague on Skype. That's when he received an email about something odd: The two massive LIGO facilities in the US had picked up a peculiar signal.
At first, it wasn't clear that it was a historic moment. "I was probably just lucky to be the first [to see it]," Drago told Tech Insider over the phone from Hanover.
As one of more than 1,000 scientists collaborating worldwide to try to detect gravitational waves using LIGO, Drago had seen a lot of these emails — he estimated about one per day — but this one showed a signal that seemed unusually strong.
LIGO uses extremely sensitive equipment to try to pick up on these cosmic ripples that, scientists long suspected, are generated by massive explosions in faraway outer space. Usually a super-strong signal like the one Drago noticed would mean that noise had interfered with the detectors, or that fake data had been inserted as a test.
Drago's first step was trying to rule out those possibilities, which seemed likelier at first than the actual detection of gravitational waves. He sent the data to the colleague he'd been talking to on Skype and to another colleague in his lab in Germany, asking both to take a look. Then he called the detection facility in the US to make sure they weren't aware of anything nearby that could have messed up the data.
"It was unbelievable at the time," he recalled.
As the data stood up to more testing, Drago started feeling more sure that these were indeed the waves Albert Einstein had predicted 100 years earlier, waves that would confirm Einstein's theory of relativity and offer an unprecedented window into what's happening in the darkest, farthest away corners of our universe.
After another month, which Drago remembers as "busy and exciting," an extensive analysis came back from other members of the LIGO collaboration. The team was confident that Drago had spotted the first gravitational waves ever observed in the world. (Since data-watching duties rotated, if it had been two weeks later, that honor might have fallen to somebody else.)
"The people who have been working on this 50, 60 years ... I can't imagine what they are feeling," he said.
For now, Drago told us, he's looking forward to the "new physics" on the horizon; an entirely new field of astronomy has been cracked open by the discovery.
The more than 1,000 scientists in the LIGO collaboration are moving quickly to get LIGO and the Italian VIRGO facility, where Drago worked before coming to Hanover, running in tandem so they can hear even more of the universe's secrets.
"Every time we have built new eyes to observe the universe, our understanding of ourselves and our place in it has been forever altered," physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote in The New York Times. Now that gravitational waves have been observed, it's hard to know what exactly we will find next.
Drago said he hopes to learn more about the Big Bang, which scientists know produced gravitational waves. "Now we are not at the end of the process," he said. "We are just starting."
