AN OXFORDSHIRE scientist who was one of the authors of this month’s groundbreaking gravitational waves paper says it feels “amazing” to know future textbooks will mention the date.

Justin Greenhalgh said the discovery has opened up a new field in astronomy and he hopes he can be a part of it.

The father-of-two from Grove manages a team at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Harwell, which helped design equipment to protect the mirrors that detected the now-famous gravitational waves from disturbances, such as people walking nearby.

Given how minute the effect of the waves was, the work was invaluable in a historic discovery that ranks alongside the work of Albert Einstein.

Mr Greenhalgh said: “It is amazing to be part of the team that has carried out a detection that opens up a whole new field of astronomy.

“Future textbooks will mention this date as being the key milestone in the field – and I helped!”

The international team of scientists who made the first ever detection of the waves described their achievement as a “monumental” event.

The discovery confirmed a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity, that astronomical collisions between massive bodies with huge gravity could create ripples in the fabric of space time, warping the effect of gravity.

In this case, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US – detected waves emanating from the collision of two black holes.

The collapsed stars, each about 30 times the mass of the Sun and located more than 1.3 billion light years from Earth, coalesced to form a single, even more massive black hole – a collision which sent ripples out across the universe.

Mr Greenhalgh said: “Now that gravity wave astronomy is on the radar, LIGO will want to upgrade further, perhaps including cryogenic systems to further improve the sensitivity of the detector, so it would be great if RAL could be part of that project.

“Because of our fantastic team of scientists, engineers and managers, RAL is uniquely placed to integrate complex state-of-the-art equipment like this, especially where it is a contribution to an international facility like LIGO.”

Mr Greenhalgh, who grew up in Bromsgrove, south of Birmingham, joined RAL on a student engineer scheme when he was 18.

He took a degree in mechanical engineering at Birmingham then returned to the lab where he has worked ever since.

That has included two stints living in Hawaii, working on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, and also working on the Large Hadron Collider – the ‘God particle machine’ – at Cern in Switzerland.

He is currently managing the UK’s £165m contribution to a new atom smashing machine called ESS in Sweden.