Gravitational-wave poems which are not limericks are also most welcome!


Recollections of the event (GW150914)

Monday, 14 September 2015:

O1, the first Advanced LIGO observing run: for long years, the letters gleamed like glyphs from the future -- this week, it starts.
Charts and checklists Megaparsecs-long are ended.
My work here at AEI Hannover is calm compared to the buzz palpable in the online logbooks and in the voices down the hall.
If we can see continuous gravitational waves from Scorpius X-1, then their trace will steadily build, perhaps discernible by winter.
Yet those at the observatories and in the depths of the instrument must make their machines work all at once.
Hectic days and sleepless nights!
Millions of meters away, all I perceive is the quiet.

Tuesday, 15 September 2015:

"Dear Group", begins our director's email: we LIGO members are having special meeting.
Maybe, I wonder, someone put in a blind injection.
Big Dog came almost exactly five years ago, while I was a visitor at Hanford Observatory.
We had rushed to measure the detector, to calibrate it threefold ways, to know whether that signal from Canis Major might be real.
All was to be torn apart, so we had to hurry to make way for the future -- today's future.
Then we waited six months to learn whether Big Dog was from the stars or ourselves.
It was, as most had guess, the latter.
What a strange decision to have a blind injection now!
Maybe I am too suspicious; maybe today is just a briefing.

Thirty or more scientists crowd into a room.
Some sit with laptops open.
I stand by a pillar.
Our director enters, locking the door.
"Should we close the blinds", I ask, semi-seriously.
"Actually, that's a good idea", he replies, "There are a lot of people here for the conference".
Blinds fell.
The projector beamed a LIGO wiki page onto the wall.
"This is not a blind injection".

Waves of information fill the room.
Amidst doubts, a sense of history tempts me to believe.
The plot unfolds like the opening of a thriller.
Questions: where is it from, what do we call it.
"The Hydra's Head?"
And what is the false alarm probability?
At last these words have gravity.
For the first time, perhaps gravity has a voice.

Saturday, 19 September 2015:

Fireworks burst over Herrenhaeuser Garten on my walk home.
I am lured by the spectacle.
On Thursday my impulse was to archive the data, offline, just in case.
On Friday, I wanted to listen to the sound of the merging black holes myself.
My friends and colleagues and I had sat down, playing that little thunderclap again, amplifying and stretching it to hear it better.
Only today, though, when I looked at the Event log, did my fears begin to abate.
All hardware channels checked, it said; our injections, indeed, were not ready.
As fireworks light my way home, I let myself start to think The Event is real.
_
Grant David Meadors, 2015


As the smaller black hole plunged towards the larger one, it knew its death wouldn’t be in vain.
A billion years in the future,
scientists on a tiny blue planet would listen to the song it sang before it went down for the final sleep...
_
Divyajyoti, 2024