DCEFF Q&A: LIGO

Discussion recorded for the 2021 Environmental Film Festival in the Nation's Capital. Co-Presented with the Carnegie Institution for Science and featuring:

Les Guthman (Director, LIGO), award winning documentary producer and director, a writer, editor and production executive.

Dr. Anthony Piro, Staff Member at the Carnegie Observatories and Adjunct Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at USC.

Dr. Maria Drout, Assistant Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto and a Dunlap Associate Professor. Click here for full bio.

Moderated by Dr. John Mulchaey, Director and the Crawford H. Greenewalt Chair of the Carnegie Observatories. Click here for full bio.

LIGO is the thrilling inside story of National Geographic's top "Discovery of the Decade," the detection of gravitational waves from deep space, which opened up the 95% of the universe that has been dark to our existing observatories and space telescopes. It's the violent "warped side" of the universe predicted by Einstein -- colliding black holes and crashing neutron stars -- but never seen before. A thousand rebel scientists around the world risked their careers on a 50-year, $1 billion search. The discovery earned the documentary’s three principal characters (including Kip Thorne, executive producer of Interstellar), the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.