Public talk (in German) “Gravitationswellen – Neuigkeiten aus dem Universum”

Nothing was heard of the Big Bang, at the beginning of the universe about 13.8 billion years ago ... or was it? When large masses are accelerated - for example, when stars orbit each other or explode, or when black holes collide - no sound waves are generated, but “gravitational waves” are. Albert Einstein predicted the existence of these waves more than a hundred years ago, and scientists have had no doubts about their existence for decades - but for a long time they could not be heard. In September 2015, an international research team succeeded for the first time in directly detecting these tiny distortions of space-time and making them audible, as well as winning a Nobel Prize for it. Since then, the age of multi-messenger gravitational wave astronomy has truly begun. This lecture will show which functional principles underlie a gravitational wave detector, which technical and quantum mechanical tricks science has to use for this purpose, and what kind of knowledge about our universe can be gained from it.