Weber Reports 1660‐Hz Gravitational Waves from Outer Space

Joseph Weber of the University of Maryland believes he has observed gravitational waves from extraterrestrial sources (Phys. Rev. Letters 22, 1320, 1969). The gravitational‐wave detectors, sensitive to 1660 Hz, were stretched over a 1000‐km baseline between the Maryland campus and Argonne National Laboratory; they showed 17 significant coincidences during the first three months of this year. The signals imply a mean gravitational‐radiation energy density of about $10−32 gram/cm3$ over a bandwidth of about 0.1 rad/sec.