Maggie Tse and I designed these jewelry items last year. These earrings represent the first-ever, directly-detected gravitational wave. They are designed with the exact data recorded by the two LIGO detectors during the first detection of gravitational waves by LIGO on September 14 2015. These waves, called GW150914 were emitted by two black holes approximately 30 times as massive as the sun, as they circled around each other in a shrinking orbit, finally merging into one single, more massive black hole. This happened around 1.3 billion years ago, and the gravitational wave traveled 1.3 billion light years in distance before it reached earth. The LIGO detectors detected the gravitational waveforms emitted by this event in the form of change in the length of the detector. This change in length as a function of time is the main signal, and we used that signal to design this jewelry. The time increases from bottom to top in the earrings. At first, the gravitational wave is small, but as the black holes get closer the wave amplitude grows. The maximum amplitude is seen when the black holes merge, and then the newly born black hole relaxes down to a smaller volume towards the end of the wave. Here's a youtube video explaining the physics. 

Download the jewelry design below and print your own. The design is optimized to be easily threaded into these metal hooks and rings purchased from amazon. 

5cm version

6cm version

Gravitational Wave Jewelry by Nancy Aggarwal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.