European Space Agency
On December 3, the European Space Agency has launched the LISA Pathfinder to detect Albert Einstein’s gravitational waves. The LISA Pathfinder was blasted off on a Vega rocket from the spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. It is carrying gold-platinum cubes that will be released in freefall to try to detect the waves predicted by the one-hundred-year-old General Theory of Relativity. According to the theory, there should be universal ripples in the fabric of space and time, caused by massive objects accelerating through the Universe. But the fluctuations are so tiny, they have never been detected by scientists.