Everything You Need to Know About Gravitational Waves in 2026

It was a little over 10 years ago, when humanity detected the first direct evidence for gravitational waves with the LIGO Observatory. And then that was joined by the Virgo Observatory in Europe, the CAGRA Observatory. And so we started to build up this picture about how black holes and neutron stars were colliding with each other across hundreds of millions, even billions of light years of space around us. And every year that goes by, we detect a whole bunch of them. And then the various observatories, they go down for maintenance and they come back online and then the cadence picks up and we go to Oh, we're detecting one black hole collision every week. And then most recently, these observatories have been finding almost a black hole collision every single day. And now we're in another maintenance phase. And this maintenance phase is going to be different because it's going to be short term where we're going to see these observatories go down, but then come back online later on this year to participate in the kinds of observations that the Vir Rubin Observatory is making. And then once they've done their part for several months, they'll go back into a maintenance phase and hopefully come back with a newly upgraded suite of instruments that will allow them to detect even more gravitational waves from higher frequency, lower frequency, the revolution will continue. So my guest today is Dr. Keith Mittman. He is a NASA Hubble fellow at Cornell University. And Dr. Mittman recently observed a gravitational wave from a black hole merger that was sort of beautiful and very similar to the one back in 2015 that set off this whole process in the first place and taught us even more about how Einstein was right, but where maybe if we continue on, we could figure out where Einstein was wrong and that would help us understand gravity. Now, Keith was good enough to answer a whole bunch of my kind of general random questions about gravitational waves. And so if you want just sort of a collection of a potpourri of gravitational wave questions, I think you'll enjoy this conversation with Dr. Keith Mittman. Keith, we were talking before this interview began, and I was like sort of off the top of my head sort of thinking about how many gravitational wave detections are being made by LIGO. And I got it totally wrong. So how many how many detections are being like, how often are you detecting definitely a gravitational wave collision? Yeah. So across the entire LIGO, Virgo, Kaggle collaboration, which is a series of four detectors currently, we tend to see about one a day, actually, maybe a little bit closer to one every two days. But one one a day is a pretty good estimate for right now. Yeah. And, you know, 2015 was when we had those that first detection, direct detection of gravitational waves. Here we are more than 10 years later. And now I think people have just become accustomed. This is the thing we do now. But does it sort of still sort of shock and amaze you every time you sit down and look at the sort of cosmic events that are going on out there in the universe? I mean, it's kind of crazy whenever we see one of these things. I mean, the fact that we're seeing it in the first place is a testament to kind of what we can do in these experiments in the first place. It's really, truly remarkable. But it's also these are the most chaotic, intense events that happen in our universe. And the fact that we're seeing one a day is is pretty remarkable. So not only am I excited whenever we see one on a given day, but the other thing that we're excited about as gravitational wave scientists is that whenever we see these, we're slowly building up a population of events. And so we're not only understanding single occurrences of these gravitational waves, but really what the population of black holes looks like in our universe. And that can kind of really guide us towards some interesting physics. So let's sort of take an imaginary journey to a collision that is about to happen. If black holes are on the order of tens of kilometers across their event horizons, when do they start generating gravitational waves that are significant enough that I guess you can start detecting them in the gravitational wave detectors on Earth? Yeah, so it depends a bit on kind of how large the black holes are. But if we assume that, you know, we're observing some kind of binary black hole coalescence, where the individual black holes are about 30 solar masses, which tends to be the average of what we see. Usually, you know, if it's the typical distance that we see it from, which is about 400 megaparsecs, usually you're seeing, you know, about five cycles of the binary actually going around before they actually emerge. So it's a relatively short process. I mean, in our detectors, it really only lasts a few tenths of a second. And that sort of five orbits, I mean, they're going relativistic velocities at this point. Oh, they're going near the speed of light. Yeah, they're going about 0.4 times the speed of light, which is an incredibly high number. Right, right, right. And so then they have to be going that fast for the detectors to even be able to pick up that collision. And so they might be getting closer and closer for tens of millions of years. And just it's beyond our ability to be able to detect them. That's right. I mean, some of these black hole mergers could have been going on since the universe began. We really don't know. But these things, you know, they go on and on and on. They eventually slowly in spiral until they're close enough to generate massive and massive amounts of energy, which is really dominated in this merger phase. And when they kind of snap together, that's when you have this huge flux of energy. And that's what we're able to see in our detectors, because it's really changing the fundamental space time right here at Earth. And that's what we can measure. Right. So I get a question a lot from my audience. And I want to, you know, I give my versions of the answer, but I want to sort of go back to the on this one, which is this sort of oft quoted mentioned in press releases and stuff where they'll talk about the amount of mass that was converted into energy and, you know, sent out into into space. So can you help people understand how, you know, if nothing can escape a black hole, how can they lose mass as they are combining into this larger black hole? Yeah, so the nice way to think about this is when you have these these binary black holes or black holes more generally, there's effectively two ways you can store energy. One is you can store energy in the form of the mass of the black hole. So that's your usual E equals mc squared formula. But you can also store energy in the actual gravitational field that is generated by these massive objects. And so when we talk about, you know, five percent of the mass being lost, effectively what we mean is if you took these black holes and you put them infinitely far away, so the only energy in the system is due to their masses, there's really no gravitational interaction going on. Then as they start to coalesce and orbit with one another, once they merge, they're going to form a final black hole whose total mass is about five percent less than the sum of the individual masses that you started with. And so that's what we really mean by the masses being converted to energy in the form of gravitational waves, is that, you know, if you had these black holes infinitely far away, those are the masses we're considering. And as they spiral together, they emit energy in the form of spacetime fluctuations. And those spacetime fluctuations are what are kind of sucking mass from the black holes as they merge together. Right. But I mean, I think, you know, when people answer this question, I sort of, you know, I've tried to wrap my head around it as well. I mean, you're not saying that the kinetic energy of their final in spiraling is the mass equivalent of the waves that are being, you know, propagated into space. Like they are actually becoming less massive. Well, it's a combined object. It's the it's that the final black holes mass is less than the sum of the individual ones. Right. Yeah. But if you just gently took two black holes and, you know, now kiss and merge them together, you would end up with a black hole that would have the combined mass of the two of them. Right. That's right. Yeah. It's the it's the it's the speed and the like. So that's help me understand this. Like, I apologize. Yeah. Right. So another I guess another way to think about it is when you bring these black holes together, they're generating gravitational potential, right? They're attracted to one another. And that potential is a form of energy, right? There's not only energy and how fast they're moving, but there's energy and how much they're being attracted to one another. And so as those bodies come closer and closer together, that potential effectively, you know, vanishes because now you just have a single body. There's no more attraction going on. And so some of that energy is being converted into gravitational waves. So the whole reason these black holes come together is that the energy, you know, that would in theory kind of keep them apart is just going out into gravitational radiation, these gravitational waves that we see. Okay. I mean, I can think about the experiments that we did in high school physics where, you know, you'd have a pendulum and you would calculate kinetic energy versus the total amount of potential energy depending on where the pendulum was. And, you know, it would always balance out. Right. Right. Right. And so the same thing happens here. It's just that the, you know, the energy that we're seeing in these binary black hole mergers isn't something that you can exactly physically point to, right? It's an energy being stored within this fabric of the universe that Einstein described. It's really something not quite tangible unless you have these incredibly sensitive interferometers like we do here in the LVK collaboration. Right. Right. So you came across my radar because there was an interesting merger that was sort of like a pristine example of a merger that helped to test some of Einstein's predictions. That's right. Can you tell me about this collision? Yeah. Yeah. So I guess the first thing I want to highlight regarding this new event that we saw, 250114, so it was detected this past January in 2025, is that it was kind of boring, honestly. If you think about the types of black holes that produce this signal, they're relatively vanilla. So they have about the same mass. They're not really spinning. You know, you could kind of model this using very simple physics, you know, if you've taken a course in general relativity, say. And so from that perspective, it was, you know, relatively simple, relatively straightforward. But what made this event so much more exciting is that it was the loudest event we had ever seen by a significant factor. And if you compare it to the original event we saw, GW150914, about 10 years ago, it's pretty much the same exact event, the same exact signal. But because our detectors have become so much more accurate in those 10 years, we were able to see it three times more significantly. So it's really a testament to the engineers and the people who physically work on these detectors, making them more accurate, that we were able to see such an important event. And that really is the culmination of funding science and making sure that we fund these detectors, because without that kind of funding, we can't make these improvements and we can't see more of these kind of golden events that really teach us a lot of interesting physics. It's interesting that you sort of got a repeat, a clone of that of the first one that was finally strong enough, finally clean enough that it was able to trip the sensors this time around. As you said, we're seeing them almost every day, but you got another example of one of those, one that if it had shown up days later in 2015, you would have detected that one as well. Yeah, it's a little eerie how similar it was. If you look at the kind of values that the black holes parameters could have, they're almost identical. So people joked at first, maybe it was the same system, just kind of the signal got warped and bent around some massive object. But realistically, it's probably just another black hole merger that ended up very similar to the first one. So what makes for a good black hole merger, a detectable one? So honestly, the end goal here is we're trying to understand what is the nature of gravity within our universe. And so way back when, our kind of original theory of gravity, to some extent, was Newton's theory. You have a simple inverse power law that describes how two massive bodies are attracted to one another. And then times changed a little bit. We learned a bit more about physics. Specifically, we learned about special relativity and kind of this speed limit that is placed by the speed of light. And then when Einstein started to think about gravity in the context of special relativity, he realized that Newton's formula didn't really make sense. And that there had to be some way to modify our understanding of gravity to be consistent with special relativity. And that's what gave rise to the theory of general relativity. Now, general relativity has been remarkably successful at explaining gravitational occurrences within our universe. But we know that it fundamentally has to be wrong. Or maybe not necessarily wrong, but not the whole picture. There are certain mathematical occurrences that don't make sense. You often hear people talk about the singularity, which is a real problem to kind of resolve. And it also turns out that we really don't expect Einstein's theory to work on small scales, where you have the theory of quantum mechanics. And so at the end of the day, with these gravitational wave experiments, one of the things that I'm very excited about is putting Einstein's theory to the test. Looking at the data, seeing if Einstein's theory agrees with it, and trying to push it to the limit where we start to see some kind of deviation. Where our theory no longer matches the data that the universe actually gives us. And so if we think about the binary black hole mergers, which helps us kind of probe this type of regime where Einstein's theory might break down, you actually kind of want the signals that are the simplest. Because if the signal is the simplest, it means we can solve Einstein's equations very easily, and then do a very confident comparison between our theory and the data that we've actually observed. So this event, 250114, since the black holes were fairly vanilla, was actually a really wonderful event to use to test Einstein's theory of relativity. How did Einstein do? He did pretty well. So we're at the point, you know, where we're really dominated by the noise in our detectors. So one of the things that tends to happen is the signals we observe tend to be around 100 hertz. This is why people tend to say that gravitational waves have a noise that's audible to humans, because it effectively rings at a frequency that we're familiar with. But another consequence is that if you have any kind of seismic activity within your detectors, there's gonna be a lot of noise and background generated by that activity, which makes observing these signals relatively hard. And so what we mean by, you know, how did Einstein do? Effectively, what we see is when we compare certain predictions of Einstein's theory with what we see in the data, the potential deviations from Einstein's theory are constrained to be about somewhere around zero with some error bar. And the error bar is effectively governed by the noise in our detector. And what's been beautiful about this recent event is that the error bar was the smallest it's ever been compared to any other observation. And the dream moving forward is that as we see more and more of these golden events, that error bar just starts shrinking down and down. And so two things will happen. It'll either shrink down to being centered right on zero. And then we say, all right, Einstein was right. Our work is done. Or more realistically, it'll start shrinking and it'll actually end up being, you know, some distance away from zero. And then this says, all right, whatever describes gravity in our universe does not agree with Einstein. We have to come up with a new theory of gravity. And that's where we physicists start getting excited. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I can sort of think about the implications of that. For example, when you think about, say, dark matter, that, you know, at the largest scales, either there is some invisible particle, or we just don't understand gravity at the largest scales. And so could you see a situation where you do get those error bars and they do start to shift off of the zero mark, that then you can take that understanding of gravity and then consider the large scale structure of the universe of that? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, one of the nice consequences is, whenever you have some theory, you know, typically we expect deviations to occur on the smaller scales. But if you kind of integrate this effect over time, and especially over the whole expanse of the universe, subtle changes in your theory can always have very drastic implications for kind of the cosmic structure of our universe. So it's a little bit hard to say, you know, what potential deviations, how they might manifest on macroscopic scales. But it's completely feasible that, you know, if we do start to figure out what the real theory of gravity is, maybe that helps explain some of these macroscopic structures that we're seeing within our universe. And do you think that, like, Einstein, sort of in his final days, was attempting to unite general relativity with quantum mechanics, and had failed to do it, and here we are decades later, and still nobody has been able to unite this. So do you think that if you do find cracks in the theory, that starts to direct you towards what kinds of research into quantum mechanics and general relativity uniting will be potentially more productive, or at least at constraints? Yeah, I mean, the best thing with having these measurements of, you know, how big can your deviation from Einstein's theory be, is it helps you rule out theories. So theorists are very good at coming up with potential theories of quantum gravity, you know. There's kind of, there are three big ones nowadays. There's string theory, there's what's called loop quantum gravity, and there's a relatively new one called celestial holography, which has been extremely promising recently. But all of these theories, right, they're just theories, and they have, you know, certain parameters that you can tweak and kind of unset, but you always need data to constrain those theories and tell you whether or not they're actually plausible. And so even with the observations we've made currently in our gravitational wave detectors, we've already ruled out some potential alternate theories of gravity, because they're just not consistent with the data. And so that's what's really remarkable, is that, you know, even though we still kind of are in a relatively new era of gravitational wave science, you know, we've only been around for 10 years, which is relatively short on scientific scales, we've already ruled out some theories of gravity. And, you know, these things tend to just increase at exponential rates. So I think in the near future, we can start to make some really serious statements about what potential theory of gravity might be the right one. Now, we are currently in a maintenance phase in between observing runs, but Vera Rubin has come online. So let me know what the potential plans are to bring LIGO back operational to assist in the 800,000 objects a night that are being announced to astronomers, thanks to Vera Rubin. Yeah, so I mean, Vera Rubin, this is a phenomenal, phenomenal piece of equipment. And as you said, you know, we're already seeing very exciting science from it. And this is kind of a really phenomenal piece of astronomy nowadays is this multi-messenger astronomy, where you have signatures from these electromagnetic signals, you know, using telescopes. And you also have these kind of independent signals coming from gravitational wave observations. And the tricky part with any kind of experiment is, you know, once you have the experiment built, it would be nice to just run it forever and just get more and more data. But there's kind of a game you have to play where on one axis, you have, you know, the amount of data collecting, you're collecting, and on the other axis, it's the quality of the data that you collect. And with the gravitational wave observatories, you know, we're doing a pretty good job at observing a lot of data when our detectors are on, but we really want to push the sensitivity of our detectors to be even better. And so this is why we go into these periods of downtime, is to make specific improvements to our detectors that we think will make them either see signals with much greater clarity, or be able to see even more signals than we were seeing previously. And so, you know, while it would be great to just run at all times and be able to assist with kind of the events that Vera Rubin is seeing, we kind of made it a strategic plan to improve our detectors and then come back online later this year to try to make these multi-messenger signals and observations feasible. And so one of the big things that we are always excited about in terms of multi-messenger astronomy is whenever you see binary neutron star mergers, so these are mergers of the second most dense objects compared to black Exactly. When these neutron stars merge, they emit lots and lots of matter. So they light up on the night sky. And so when you have telescopes, they can see that electromagnetic radiation. But since these binary neutron stars are also incredibly dense and emitting a lot of gravitational energy as they coalesce, they also emit gravitational waves that we can see in our detectors. And so when you have both of those signals, you can not only better pinpoint where that event was on the sky, but you can also learn other interesting things about our universe, such as the quantity that is related to the current Hubble tension, this Hubble parameter. And so the hope is that if we have both of these experiments running simultaneously, when we see these golden binary neutron star events, we can really start to do really interesting physics regarding cosmology. So one idea that I'm kind of fascinated about is this idea as gravitational waves as a cosmic siren that you can get an independent measurement of the distance to things in the universe, in a way that is sort of self consistent. So can you explain how astronomers sort of think about using gravitational waves as a, you know, it's sort of in tandem with type one supernovae and other things to kind of measure the expansion rate of the universe? Yeah, so this is honestly something I'm a little bit less familiar with. A lot of my colleagues here at the CCA are much more experts than I am. But effectively, the way this works is when we want to constrain the Hubble parameter, which effectively tells us how much our universe is expanding at all times and at all positions in the universe, you really want to know how far away something is and at what redshift it occurred. So effectively, you know, with what speed it's moving away from us. And so if you kind of observe a gravitational wave, you know, we have very good constraints on what the total mass is through the frequency of the signal itself, as well as how far away it occurred based on the amplitude of the signal. And so then the last thing you kind of need is just to know this redshift information, which if you kind of assume certain knowledge about the population of these events, you can also start to tease out. And so really, the kind of way this works is by having electromagnetic counterparts, which kind of give you understandings of certain where galaxies or clusters are occurring, as well as gravitational wave events, which give you the specific details of these binary mergers, you can start to kind of build up this cosmic map of where all these events are occurring and start to tease out, you know, kind of how this expansion is occurring over these macroscopic scales. And so you can actually use just gravitational waves alone to measure the Hubble parameter. It just turns out that with the current sensitivities we have and the current population of events, we're placing constraints that are nowhere near some of the other experiments out there using supernova. Yeah. And that was my understanding was that that that if you observe a gravitational wave event, you can derive the distance to that event purely through the the the, you know, the wavelengths that you're seeing the gravitational waves come at you. That's right. Yeah. In a way that is different from anything else, like everything else is kind of relative, you're going to measure type 20 supernova, you have to assume you know, their intrinsic brightness, you're going to measure exact set of variables, you know, their intrinsic brightness. Now, that cosmic distance letter has been calculated very carefully all the way out. And they use James Webb, and they've, you know, people have won Nobel prizes for these kinds of observations. But, but having something that is that doesn't require that distance ladder in the same way is quite exciting. And as you said, that it's, it's purely that you just your error bars are too big. So you just don't get the number that gives you you don't get a satisfying number yet. And so and yet, you know, is the big factor here, because we expect, you know, with maybe LVK detectors, but certainly with next generation detectors, we're definitely going to be a part of this conversation. And we're going to make meaningful statements. Right, right. So things like the Einstein telescope, next generation gravitational wave observatories, what's gonna happen with Lisa, things like that, that, that, that we may get those levels of accuracy, and then be able to have a totally different way to, to measure this. So there's one regime that that visible light just cannot pass. And that is the cosmic microwave background radiation. So do you think at all about if we could ever access grab primordial gravitational waves? Yeah, primordial gravitational waves are a little tricky, you know, every once in a while, we'll see event and somebody will claim, Oh, that was a primordial black hole. So it's always tough to say. But I think, you know, another really interesting field of gravitational wave physics that we haven't really touched on yet is, you know, we have these detectors here on Earth that we've built. But there's also detectors out in the universe that we can utilize these pulsar timing arrays. And so what's really great about pulsar timing arrays is that they span incredible distances, which means they probe very low frequency gravitational waves. And so if you want to understand, say, you know, the background of gravitational radiation, whether that's from supermassive binary black hole mergers, or even details regarding the beginning of the universe, these PTAs are really great at kind of probing those features. And so while we hope to, you know, maybe observe primordial black holes in our ground-based detectors here on Earth, you know, it's kind of a guessing game. We really don't know what we expect to see. And, you know, even if we see something that potentially might be a candidate, it's hard to say for sure that it certainly was a primordial black hole. But yeah, like detecting a merger between black holes where one of them, say, has the mass of the sun, that would say the only way you can get that is with a primordial black hole. But I'm just talking about like the gravitational waves that must have been caused by the Big Bang itself. Like if you go right back to the very beginning of the universe, it must have been an environment where mass was moving around very quickly. And so in theory, the gravitational waves are still permeating the universe to this day. Yeah, that's right. In the same way that there's a cosmic microwave background that is in the form of light, we should see the same thing in gravitational radiation. The tricky thing then is that it's going to be incredibly low frequency. And so whenever you want to probe a low frequency effect, the size of your interferometer has to be much larger. And so this is where we can utilize PTAs, these pulsar timing arrays, which are effectively pulsars at very separate distances to kind of probe what that low frequency background structure is. And so I don't know what the current estimates are for kind of measuring the background due to the origins of the universe, but these PTAs are certainly already providing to be very promising at observing these very low frequency signals. Yeah, I mean, I know that that astronomers have said, yeah, we've, we've definitely discovered the background of merging supermassive black holes. And there was a paper that came out a couple of weeks ago where they said we failed to directly detect any merging supermassive black holes, but it is still theoretically possible. And so that's a thing that, that hopefully the pulsar timing arrays will turn out maybe before Lisa does, but if not, then we wait, we wait on Lisa. So so give people sort of a sense of the timeline, then you as you said, you're going to try to come back online by the end of the year, then will you sort of stick around for a few months into the year and then, and then go into a longer maintenance phase or, or is this just going to be a short maintenance phase? Yeah. So, you know, us coming online towards the end of the year is, is a bit of a surprise. You know, we weren't originally planning to do this, but kind of based on the funding background, we decided it was worth it to just turn back on, get some more data before going into the much longer shutdown period where we're going to do a lot of improvements. So with the upcoming run, I don't know the exact details, but I'm pretty sure you can expect the detectors to be on for several months, at least six months or more. And then we'll go down into our period of a very long shutdown compared to this previous one. We're going to make significant improvements to the detectors so that when we come back online, hopefully we see some more of these golden events. And what are some of the big ideas that you're excited about for that, that next round of improvements that you think should pay dividends? Well, the one thing that I'm particularly interested in is, you know, interesting physics happens at many different frequencies, even within gravitational waves and the binary black holes that we observe in the LVK collaboration. And it just so happens that, you know, some of the most interesting things happen at the two opposite ends of the spectrum. So things are very high frequencies and things are very low frequencies. And so kind of improving the low frequency sensitivity is tough because that is just kind of the natural seismic vibration of the earth, and it's very hard to isolate that noise. But I know the experimentalists have some ideas for how to kind of tame these seismic activity contributions to really start to probe some of these low frequency features a little bit more. Like an adaptive optics system for a gravitational wave observatory or something? Yeah, something like that. Right. And so there's a lot of interesting physics at low frequencies that maybe we'll touch on a little bit later that I'm particularly interested in, and hopefully these improvements will help elucidate that. Right, right. But do you think, yeah, like, we'll get higher and higher on the high- because, like, there have not been, say, white dwarf neutron star mergers definitely detected. We haven't seen white dwarf mergers yet. Hopefully those will be available in the next run? Yeah, probably not. So I think within the LVK collaboration, you can pretty safely assume that all we're going to see is binary black hole mergers and binary neutron star mergers or black hole neutron star mergers in the near future. I think to see some of these systems that you were discussing, you really need to wait until next generation detectors that will kind of be much more sensitive as well as probe different frequency bands. Right. Okay. All right. Isn't it weird, though, that we, like, we're so familiar with gravity and yet we still kind of don't know what it is? It's the strange- I say this every time I speak to my students, but, you know, when you roll out of bed every morning, you don't feel electromagnetism. You don't feel the strong force or the weak force. You feel gravity. And of all the forces in nature, those four forces that I just listed, theoretically, gravity is the one we understand the least, which is a little bit strange that it's so familiar in our day-to-day experience. But fundamentally, we just don't understand it. And so that's part of why I'm a gravitational wave physicist, is gravity itself as a concept is just a wonderful thing. It's mathematically beautiful and incredibly interesting. And the fact that we feel it every day but don't really understand it just makes me have an even bigger drive to try to really get at the nitty details. A key question I ask all of my guests, what are you obsessed with? You know, I might give the kind of typical answer of I'm obsessed with science, with understanding new things and understanding the way in which our universe works. But I suppose what I've recently been obsessed with is getting my sourdough bread to rise as I'd like it to. And? And we're getting there, you know? Yeah. I've always loved cooking, you know, I've always really loved the kind of freedom cooking enables with just throwing spices together and you don't have to worry too much about measurements. Especially because, you know, I work so much with measurements every day in my daily life as a gravitational wave scientist. But recently I've gotten into baking where apparently measurements matter a lot more and I'm slowly learning that as I try to get my sourdough to rise. Right. We took a crack at it here and I think partly my wife was a little creeped out by that you just have this organism growing and multiplying on your warm countertop. And she found that a little weird and that you're feeding it and and it like it was really easy for it to go bad and turn into this evil monster that then it's almost impossible to scrape it off the side and start again. Like you might as well just throw away the glass that it was in because it's just so sticky and gloopy. And so we never got to the point where I think we tried making bread once with it and it just was not so I can I can see how it sort of it contains so much sort of science and chemistry and measuring things down to the tenth of a gram. And you bring an atomic clock home every now and then just to make sure you get your timings right. Yeah. You know, ideally, if I had access to that technology, I'd certainly use it. But yeah. Yeah. And so until you've made bread that you're happy with. Yeah. Yeah. I made my first first two loaves about two weekends ago where I was genuinely happy with it. They had a nice spring. They opened up very well. Good pockets inside and they tasted great. So I'm pretty pleased. Oh, right on. I'm jealous then. Yeah. Maybe we'll take another crack. I don't think so. I think I think that experiment is over in this household. So, yeah, I kind of missed the whole covid bubble when everyone was. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So now I'm in my my bread making moment and it's been a lot of fun. Right on. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat. And thanks for just like generally answering my questions about gravitational waves. And I, you know, I had a whole bunch more, but but I, you know, I'll save them for for a future time. I really appreciate it. And good luck with with all of your research. And I can't wait to see this sort of super team up between LIGO, Virgo, Kagra and Vera Rubin. This is going to be amazing. Yeah, I think the next 10 years have a lot to offer for multi-messenger astronomy. And, you know, thank you for taking the time to speak with me and thank you for doing all the work that you do to help engage the public with these really, really interesting things that we scientists work on every day. Right on. All right. Take care. You too. I hope you enjoyed the conversation with Dr. Keith Mittman. Now we continue the conversation into a different direction, which was the basis of his doctoral thesis. And that is that space time can have a memory and be changed as gravitational waves move through a region, actually change the distances of things in space. This is a very strange idea, and yet is one of the consequences potentially of gravitational waves moving through the cosmos. And so we have this longer conversation over on Patreon. Now, again, I got to make this disclaimer every time there is no paywall, you don't have to donate these conversations are available free, but they're available ad free over on Patreon. So I'm going to put a link down the show notes, you can watch that right now over on Patreon completely for free. I hope you'll enjoy that additional conversation. Now I'm going to give you some final thoughts. But first, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingston, Andrea Pedretti, BarelyGroofing, Brian Bode, Caravan, Chuck Hawkins, Commander Baylock, Cooper & Allie, Darkfinger, David Gilten, David Matz, Evan.pro, Greg Feely, James Clark, Jeremy Madden, Jim Burke, Jordan Young, Josh Schultz, Marcel Smits, Michael Purcell, NordSpace, OneStepForAnimals.org, Parabok, Renkaidu, Richard Williams, Sean Sargent, Stephen Father-Munley, Team 49, Telescopes Canada, Wolfgang Klotz, and Zeldaboard Galactic Defender who support us at the Master of the Universe level and all our patrons. All your support means the Universe to us. Gravitational waves hold a special place in my heart because they sort of sit right at almost the halfway point of my work as an astronomy journalist. I started in 1989, they were discovered in 2015, here we are, I've been doing this for almost 27 years, so you know, around the halfway mark. And that they were this thing that had been predicted by Einstein decades ago. And yet it took this very careful work by really smart physicists to develop the theories and figure out whether or not they would even be detected, and then incredible instrument developers to actually build the machines that will find this. The physics involved of mirrors bouncing across the arms of these interferometers is just stupefying, and yet, we are finding them. And not only that, but they're continuing to improve the observatories to turn up even more of them year after year after year. And this is sort of setting the ground, helping us understand what that next generation of gravitational wave observatories are going to be ones with longer arms, ones that go into space, ones that use pulsars across the universe as a natural gravitational wave observatory. And the reason is because it gives us independent way to look at the cosmos, we have the electromagnetic radiation, which is what we've relied on for the entire history of astronomy. And then, in the last 10 years, we have something that is completely different, not a different flavor of EM radiation, but a different way of looking at the universe. And it's only going to get better. And it's only going to teach us more. All right, we'll see you next time.