Cast your mind back four years, and gravitational waves were the talk of the

town. On September 14, 2015, the first detection of these ripples in space-
time was made by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration, revealed months later to
deserved global fanfare. Now with the fourth anniversary of that discovery
approaching, the field has matured dramatically with dozens of subsequent
detections made—and the prospect of even more thrilling discoveries on the
horizon.

The field “has exploded,” says Nergis Mavalvala from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. “I’ve really been amazed at what we’ve been able to
achieve. It’s staggering both on the astrophysics side, and the immense
improvements to the instruments that have come about.”

Including that first discovery, a total of 23 confirmed gravitational-wave

detections have been made to date across three observing runs. Within
those, 20 have been black hole mergers, two have been neutron star
mergers, and one is the suspected first known instance of a merger between
a black hole and a neutron star. Each has been exciting in its own right, but
the sheer volume of detections—moving from one a month to nearly one a
week, thanks to upgrades to LIGO in 2018 and 2019 that improved its
sensitivity—is hugely impressive. By some estimates gravitational-wave
observatories could catch a merger every hour by 2023. “It’s hard to
overstate how explosive the growth of gravitational-wave astronomy has
been,” says Ben Farr of the University of Oregon.
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Thanks to that explosive growth, remarkable progress is being made across

multiple subdisciplines of astrophysics. Daniel Holz from the University of
Chicago says that the study of black hole mergers, which now seems almost
“boring” due to the high volume of observed events, is being nonetheless
transformed. “We’re moving very rapidly into the area of population and
statistics,” he says. “Instead of analyzing one, we’re analyzing a whole
bunch of them. Now we get to see what is the distribution method, how
many are big, how many are small. Even if they continue to be ‘boring,’ the
distribution of the boring events is fascinating.”

The first neutron star merger observed by LIGO and Virgo, meanwhile, has
helped researchers probe some fundamental aspects of the universe itself.
Christopher Berry from Northwestern University notes that gamma rays
from the event were detected by other telescopes 1.6 seconds after the
gravitational waves, which allowed for an unprecedented test of the speed
of gravity versus the speed of light. “We’d expect a little difference in their
arrival time because they weren’t necessarily created at the same time,” he
says. “But the fact that it was 1.6 seconds allowed us to test that the speed of
light and the speed of gravity really are the same thing, as predicted in
general relativity.”

Another way scientists have hoped to probe relativity is to see gravitational

waves that have been “gravitationally lensed” by a massive object. Just as
light can be bent and magnified when it passes through the gravitational
fields of galaxies and other massive objects, gravitational waves should be
warped in the same way, too. Last month astronomers were momentarily
abuzz at the possible detection of such an event when two similar looking
gravitational-wave signals washed over Earth just 21 minutes apart—a hint
the waves might have been from the same source and had been lensed.
Unfortunately, further examination showed that the back-to-back signals
had come from two different directions in the sky, but astronomers remain
hopeful of spotting such an event in the future, although it might not be
easy. “The probability of a chanced alignment is really small,” says Asantha
Cooray, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine who is
unaffiliated with the LIGO/Virgo collaboration. “You would have to [do
hundreds of observations] to see one of these things.”

Lensing events are not the only future discoveries anticipated by

astronomers. One of the most enticing is the possible detection of
gravitational waves caused by a detonating supernova. Such an event,
however, would probably need to happen in our galaxy in order for LIGO
and Virgo to detect it. “That happens roughly once a century,” Holz says.
“And it hasn’t happened as far as we can tell in the last four years. So that’s
something that we still have to wait for. It’ll happen someday.”

More ambitiously, scientists also think it might be possible to someday see

primordial gravitational waves, left over from the first fractions of a second
after the big bang. Such waves would allow researchers to look back further
than ever before toward the birth of the universe. “The earliest light that
reaches us as observers was [emitted] when the universe was 400,000
years old,” Mavalvala says. “Whereas gravitational waves have been
streaming to us since the earliest moments after the big bang.”
Unfortunately, the signatures of such waves should be so incredibly feeble
that only so-called third-generation gravitational-wave detectors, such as
the planned Cosmic Explorer in the U.S. or the Einstein Telescope in
Europe, would be capable of detecting them.
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And, of course, the gravitational-wave deluge is revealing unexpected new

mysteries as well. One example is the unknown origin of the black holes
involved in these mergers, known as stellar-mass black holes as they are
several times the mass of our Sun. “Naively you’d like to think that well,
this category of black holes are the remnants of ordinary stars going
supernova,” Mavalvala says. “But we know that ordinary stars can’t grow to
be tens of solar masses big. So that formation scenario is not easily
supported.” Another possibility is that they are the result of mergers of
smaller black holes, but that requires an unfathomably large population of
smaller black holes in the universe to account for the number of mergers
seen. The true answer remains elusive for now.

Four years on, the growth of gravitational-wave astronomy shows no signs

of slowing. “I think it’s been a revolution,” Berry says. “We’ve really opened
our eyes to what’s out there, that was invisible, that we can only reveal
through gravitational waves.” And with the detections piling up higher and
higher, there is plenty more to come.