Picture biography, 40 pages. Audience: 4 - 8 years. Published by Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers in 2022.
The Search for Ripples in Space-Time
Gabriella González, a physicist at Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory - LIGO - helped to confirm Albert Einstein's prediction about gravitational waves in space-time.
Whoa! Who wouldn't want to emulate González's curiosity, hard-work and perseverance! In 1916 Einstein published a paper predicting the existence of gravitational waves - ripples in space-time. Describing space-time as a large lily pad which curves when a heavy frog sits on it, he predicted that the collision of two massive objects like neutron stars would produce energy strong enough to create gravitational waves. Einstein concluded, unfortunately, that we would not be able to detect the gravitational waves because the signals would become quite small by the time they reached Earth. One hundred years later, in 2016, the announcement of the first detection of gravitational waves in space by LIGO - waves created by the collision to two black holes 1.3 billion years ago - was accomplished by González's work on detecting background noises at the atomic level. Making it Real
There are quite a few activity resources at LIGO's Try This at Home page - including how to build your own Intoferometer with glue or magnets!!
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