A decade after WA played a key role in the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of gravitational waves, local physicists are pushing to build a new observatory on home soil.

In 1999 the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory was built across two sites in the United States.

Its goal was to observe the collision of two black holes light-years away, proving Einstein’s century-old prediction that gravity works in waves.

But it took homegrown experts at the Australian International Gravitational Observatory to spot a fatal flaw in the data coming out of the US project.

They had built a smaller, test version of the US facility years earlier in the small town of Gingin, north of Perth, and noticed an issue with how the data was being recorded.

AIGO founder and gravitational wave physicist David Blair said the problem lay with the precision needed to record the experiment.

“Whenever you try to measure something really precisely, you end up disturbing what you’re trying to record, all sorts of other things go wrong,” he said.

By building a system to cancel out the disturbances, the team at Gingin was able to take more precise readings.

Partly thanks to them, the experiment was a success and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017.

While the Australian researchers didn’t receive the Nobel Prize, Professor Blair said the experiment changed the way astrophysicists were seen in WA.

“In the years leading up to [the experiment], one observatory director described us as just a mob of physicists trying to hijack astronomy’s money,” he said.

The experiment gained AIGO global recognition as well as a reputation within Australian science fields at a time when physics was struggling.

“They said gravitational waves aren’t astronomy until you’ve detected something, but then we detected them,” Professor Blair said.

“Now we’ve been more embraced by astronomers because it’s discovered such great stuff, and hopefully a whole lot more.”

These days, the Gingin facility is operated by a small team that continues to run experiments.

But the existing detectors in the Northern hemisphere only cover half the night sky.

To reveal the full picture, the observatory is pushing to build a full Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in Gingin.

Professor Blair said there were plans to build larger detectors elsewhere in the world, and if one was built in the southern hemisphere, it would open up the entire night sky to gravity detection.

Curtin University astronomy lecturer Nick Seymour agreed WA was in a unique position for another detector.

“[WA is] a remarkably quiet place to listen to the universe, and parts of the state have exceptionally low seismic noise,” he said.