IT may sound like something straight out of a science fiction plot, but Scotland's chief scientific advisor is currently hunting for ripples in the fabric of the spacetime continuum.

Professor Sheila Rowan’s team recently discovered a burst of gravitational waves created by two black holes colliding which caused the entire universe to shudder.

The ripple in spacetime began 1.8 billion years ago and originated so far away that it wasn’t picked up until August.

Her team, based at labs at University of Glasgow, is now trying to zero in on the precise location of the cataclysmic event so that they can learn more about how our universe came into being.

Rowan is the Chief Scientific Adviser (CSA) for Scotland, providing expert advice to the Scottish Government to help inform policymaking.

The 47-year-old from Dumfries also leads the University of Glasgow’s Institute for Gravitational Research, which is in partnership with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a large-scale physics experiment and observatory set up to detect cosmic gravitational waves.

Rowan said: “We helped design and build the instruments and, of course, very excitingly got those signals, detected them, analysed them and started to work out what’s producing them out in the cosmos.”

The latest ripple to be discovered was created when two black holes with masses of about 31 and 25 times the mass of the sun combined to produce a newly spinning black hole with about 53 times the mass of the sun.

Rowan said: “Gravitational waves cause the universe to shudder just a little bit. They send a ripple through all of us.”

It was the fourth gravitational wave to be picked up by the project. Last week the Nobel prize in physics was awarded to three American physicists who first found ripples in the fabric of spacetime in 2015.

Gravitational waves – oscillations in the fabric of spacetime, moving at the speed of light and caused by the acceleration of massive objects – were first predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago in his Theory of General Relativity.

They carry unique information about the origins of our universe and studying them provides important insights into black holes, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and neutron stars.

The latest wave was the first to be picked up by Europe’s sole detector in Italy. Known as Virgo, the detector uses sophisticated laser interferometry techniques to measure the extremely weak distortion of spacetime.

Rowan explained: “We do it with light. We take light from a laser, send out light waves along two very long arms, reflect them back, and use the wave length of that light effectively to measure the length of those arms and how much they might be stretched and squashed as a gravitational wave passed by, and, effectively how much that gravitational wave shakes mirrors we’ve placed several kilometres apart.”

There are just three detectors worldwide. Virgo in Italy and the LIGO detectors in the USA. Rowan hopes that a fourth under construction in Japan will offer even more information about the origins of gravitational waves.

Rowan said: “We are really still at the start of a new field of astronomy and we want to work with our partners who have telescopes to ask them to look at the point in the sky where our gravitational waves are coming from to see what they see, and to do that we need to be able to tell them where to look. As we get more and more detectors we can pinpoint with much better accuracy where a signal came from.”

WHAT IS SPACE-TIME

Well, it's pretty difficult to understand even for really brainy folk who are really good at hard sums, but put simply space-time is a mathematical model that joins space and time into a single idea called a 'continuum'.

Combining the idea of space and time helped physicists understand how the universe works on both the big level, such as galaxies, and small level, such as atoms. The laws of physics now state that time cannot be separated from the three dimensions of space.