The easiest way I can explain a gravitational wave is, you know, many people have seen these pictures of the idea that space-time is kind of like this rubber sheet.

You have this idea that massive objects like stars and planets, or especially black holes, can deform that sheet of space-time.

And a gravitational wave is a ripple in that sheet.

You can imagine if you bounced up and down a star,

you can get a ripple that travels across that medium.

That ripple travels with the speed of light.

It carries energy, it carries momentum,

and it can carry information about the objects that produced it.

We want to build a gravitational wave detector so that we can

read those waves, detect those waves, use them to understand the objects that

produced them.

This is NASA's curious universe.

Our universe is a wild and wonderful place.

I'm your host, Patty Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide.

We have so many ways of understanding our universe.

Telescopes on Earth and in space bring us incredible pictures,

provide information about the composition of faraway planets and galaxies,

and even clue us in to information the human eye can't see.

But the electromagnetic light we capture with a telescope isn't the only information the universe is providing us.

There are so many ways to sense or understand the universe, including through a relatively new discovery called gravitational waves.

Gravitational waves are traveling ripples in time and space.

The ones we can detect here on Earth are caused by the gravity of really, really big objects.

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