FE ATURE
Richard O’Shaughnessy: Opening a New Window on the Universe When asked if he would ever want to travel into space, astrophysicist and Wellington alumnus Richard O’Shaughnessy ’92 answered without hesitation, “No - space is very dangerous!” He should know. There are few people living today more qualified to answer that question. With a B.A. in astronomy from Cornell University and a Ph.D. 2
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in physics from the California Institute of Technology, O’Shaughnessy is currently a math and astrophysics professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology. And that’s just his day job. He is also a researcher for LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), a large-scale physics experiment and observatory. For the last 15
years, O’Shaughnessy has been working with a group of top scientists detecting gravitational waves. As a graduate student, most of his thesis work was dedicated to designing the LIGO mirror, accounting for the slight temperature induced fluctuations in the equipment. In February of 2016, O’Shaughnessy was finishing
writing a grant proposal describing all the physics he and his LIGO colleagues could do after detecting binary black holes when he received an email that the discovery had, in fact, just been made. “I felt like I’d won the lottery,” he said. The scientific historical moment in which O’Shaughnessy had been a part involved two binary black holes colliding and causing gravitational waves that confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity. “We detected a new astrophysical source we had never seen before,” he said.