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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

So, okay, to Tinnitapi, nitaniku, Mako Yuksu, Kyi Gray.

Hi, I was just giving a greeting in Blackfoot, and I gave my Blackfoot name, which is Wolf's Path, and also my name, Corey Gray.

I'm Regina Barber, and I've known Corey for years.

We've connected at conferences as fellow scientists of color.

I am a senior operation specialist at the Ligo-Hanford Observatory in eastern Washington State.

LIGO measures ripples in space called gravitational waves.

Yeah, so what are gravitational waves?

For, I guess the main thing I would say that all of this comes from Albert Einstein.

It comes from his general theory of relativity in 1915.

Basically, gravity is just how masses bend the space around them. And that's the idea of what gravity is in general relativity.

If you take this mass and accelerate it in space or space-time,

those accelerations vibrate space-time.

And those vibrations, those wiggles in space-time are what gravitational waves are.

LIGO stands for laser interferometer gravitational observatory, and Corey has worked there since the

beginning. He waited 17 years to see evidence of two black holes colliding into each other.

The first direct evidence of gravitational waves. A hundred years almost to the day after Einstein's prediction.

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