UWM Scientists help Nobel Prize winners through gravitational waves in space research

MILWAUKEE (CBS 58) -- A team from UW-Milwaukee helped support three Americans sharing this year's Nobel Prize in Physics.

Xavier Siemens, an Associate Professor of Physics at UWM and three other professors are part of a scientific collaboration called Ligo.

There are about 1,000 people in the collaboration which studies gravitational waves in space. 

UWM scientists studied the data from Ligo which was used by other scientists who were awarded the Nobel Prize.

"With Ligo, we can create a gravitational wave telescope. We can detect black holes and other systems and make a picture of the sky and see what it looks like with gravitational waves, much like you'd see with optical astronomy or radio astronomy or x-ray astronomy," said Professor Xavier Siemens. 

Siemens tells us UWM's data research was a big part in helping win the Nobel Prize. The university will host a lecture about the Ligo findings on gravitational waves Friday night at 8 p.m. in the Kenwood Interdisciplinary Research Complex, located on campus.