Nobel Prize winner welcomed to Cardiff

Nobel Prize winner Professor Barry Barish has made a special visit to Cardiff University to mark the launch of a brand new research institute specialising in the exploration of gravitational waves. Professor Barish, who was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics, met with staff and postgraduate research students from the School of Physics and Astronomy and delivered a public lecture at the National Museum Wales. Professor Barish is a Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology and was awarded the Nobel Prize - alongside Kip Thorne and Rainer Weiss - for his contributions to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the first ever detection of gravitational waves. In the mid-1990s, Professor Barish founded the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, a consortium of over 1000 scientists from more than 80 institutions worldwide. The group operates observatories which detect gravitational waves - tiny ripples in space-time that are emitted from violent cosmic events, such as colliding black holes and neutron stars. Cardiff University is a founding member of the LIGO collaboration and has made integral contributions to the establishment of LIGO and the detection of gravitational waves. Using two detectors in the US, LIGO first detected gravitational waves in 2016, emanating from the collision of two black holes that were circling each other over 1.3 billion light years from Earth.