Margot Phelps helped install Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) systems in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana, which detected gravitational waves in February. She said she’s very proud to be part of the discovery.
“It feels incredible,” Phelps told The Journal in an email. “I’m so proud not only of the part I played but also of the fact that an international collaboration of scientists was able to work together so effectively and create something so incredibly complicated and successful.”
Phelps, who graduated from M-CHS in 2004, attended University of Colorado Boulder, where she earned a double physics degree and was given the award for outstanding physics graduate in 2008.
She then went to work at LIGO at the California Institute of Technology from 2009 to 2014, where she worked as an engineer on observational lab equipment.
Now, Phelps is in Scotland, where she received a full-ride scholarship to the University of Glasgow to continue her doctoral research in gravitational waves. She is working to develop ground-based gravitational wave detectors.
Phelps has presented research in Budapest, Hungary and Elba, Italy and worked this spring at the Kamioka (KAGRA) Observatory in Japan. Phelps’ supervisor at the University of Glasgow, Sheila Rowan, recently was named chief scientific adviser of Scotland.
LIGO scientists say that gravitational waves came from merging black holes and represent a ripple in spacetime, which would confirm part of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. On June 15, LIGO detected gravitational waves a second time.
After the initial detection, scientists had to keep the discovery a secret for about five months until they could confirm that they were gravitational waves, Phelps said.
“I don’t think most people realize what a huge gamble it was — to build an observatory to observe something that has never been seen before, that you aren’t even sure can be seen, while pushing the limits of what technology can do,” she said.
Phelps grew up in the country between Cortez and Dolores. She loved being able to run and play outside, and she stargazed from the roof of the family’s garage, she said. She started memorizing star clusters and constellations and became interested in the universe, she said.
She discovered Stephen Hawking’s book “A Brief History of Time” as a freshman in high school and became more interested in physics and astronomy, she said. Later, she met Hawking while working at the California Institute of Technology.
“From a young age, my family and parents encouraged me to pursue science that I was interested in,” Phelps said.
Many scientists from all over the world have devoted their entire careers to the discovery of gravitational waves, Phelps said. The discovery is important because it’s the first direct detection of something Einstein predicted — yet doubted the existence of — 100 years ago, Phelps said. It opens up a new field of astronomy, she said.
“I can only imagine what we will learn in the next few years of operation about black holes, dark matter, neutron stars or possibly even phenomena we could not previously imagine existing in our universe,” Phelps said.
jklopfenstein@the-journal.com