“We did it” - David Reitze said. The coolest thing I heard in my life. Yes indeed, we detected gravitational waves and it is indeed a proud moment for all the people involved in the research for years but also a proud moment for humanity. We have come far but we have further to go.
The morning of September the 14th 2015, I got into my office the regular time (please don't ask me what is my regular time), and stated to study the data, yes the real data, for the engineering run 8, using our algorithm called as coherent wave burst. I was one of those extremely lucky person who had the opportunity to learn the basics about the data analysis on the real data and previously I presented some work in the collaboration meeting for the engineering run 7 of the two LIGO detectors. That morning I was doing my regular job and then I saw thins notification, the automatic one which alerts us in case of some interesting event. I thought naively that Marco Drago (in Hannover, working in coherent wave burst online) will take care of that, as it’s his domain. And he did. He circulated an email immediately to the collaboration, telling that this event looks pretty interesting, and it was.
I got on Skype with Marco, I was shaking with excitement and then he told me it could be a test (it wasn't). Here is a snippet of me talking with him.
Yes, we found the gravitational waves, also I was involved actively while doing so. Our method didn't only provide the initial notification, but also gave strong hints for the origin of the source being a heavy mass system (black hole binary). That feeling kept me from sleeping in the night, firstly because I was too excited but later due to the work that followed. We also provided the confidence in our signal later in the paper.
Magical moment in my life and to this day I don't feel worthy enough of being part of such a discovery for which I have just worked for a couple of years and thanks to the PhD topic I was so lucky to be actively involved in the research.
What followed September 14th was emotions, opinions, fight and struggle within the collaboration, which I was totally unaware of, given my immaturity, and that helped me to build character. And then there was the day of the announcement in February 2016, which spread thenews all over the world. Unfortunately I was not able to do any outreach in the real world, due to my lack of Italian speaking capabilities, but I tried to do everything I can on the internet.
In this dynamical world, first detection of the gravitational waves is now history. We look forward to the bright future of the gravitational waves astronomy. There are so many things unexplored and unseen and it is really exciting to go to work every day and see the data and infer information from it. Also get ready for anything that might come to us. I am working on supernovae with gravitational waves and neutrinos, black holes binaries with different flavours (like eccentricity etc.) and study the so called quasi normal modes. They are all transient sources and they can be detected by our method. I feel that there are so many things to do as we can’t say that we will be ready when we see something, now is time to be ready.
I feel so humbled and lucky. Furthermore, I tried to learned about the history of our detectors and the field itself, there are so many people all over the world who gave their lives for this moment and I am a new born in the gravitational waves world, wondering what just happened. I hope that one day I will grow up and will have enough body of work behind me to feel good enough to tell my coming generations about this story. Also this is one of the few things in the world which united people from everywhere to achieve such a result, which in itself is heart warming.