Scientists use artificial intelligence to detect gravitational waves

When gravitational waves were first detected in 2015 by the advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), they sent a ripple through the scientific community, as they confirmed another of Einstein's theories and marked the birth of gravitational wave astronomy. As LIGO and its international partners continue to upgrade their detectors' sensitivity to gravitational waves, they will be able to probe a larger volume of the universe--making the detection of gravitational wave sources a daily occurrence rather than weekly or monthly. Scientists hope this will launch a new era of precision astronomy, because combining information from multiple kinds of signals from space is a much more powerful way to study the universe. But realizing this goal will require a radical re-thinking of existing methods used to search for and find gravitational waves. Recently, Argonne National Laboratory computational scientist Eliu Huerta, along with collaborators from the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NVIDIA and IBM, developed a new artificial intelligence framework that allows for accelerated, scalable and reproducible detection of gravitational waves.