Sentences with phrase «detect passing gravitational waves»

LIGO's interferometers bounce laser beams between mirrors at the opposite ends of 4 - kilometre - long vacuum pipes, aiming to detect passing gravitational waves that stretch and compress the length of the pipes — along with the rest of space.

LIGO's instruments are designed to detect passing gravitational waves by measuring minuscule expansions and contractions of space - time — warps as little as one - thousandth the diameter of a proton.

Not exact matches

Gravitational waves formed by binary supermassive black holes take months or years to pass Earth and require many years of observations to detect.

DETECTING ripples in space - time is, on paper, easy: you simply measure how passing gravitational waves disturb the transmission of laser beams bouncing between mirrors.

By cross-correlating the arrival times of all the different pulses to nanosecond precision across decades, astronomers hope to detect gravitational waves with wavelengths measured in light - months and light - years as their passing periodic ripples distort spacetime around Earth.

If separated by millions of kilometers and linked by lasers, such a system could then detect the exquisitely small distance changes caused by passing gravitational waves.

We are attempting to detect the gravitational waves by hanging two huge mirrors from wires, each pair of mirrors about two and a half miles apart, and as the waves pass, the mirrors ride on that stretching and squeezing space so they are pushed apart and pulled together, back and forth.

Passing gravitational waves alter the lengths of the beams» paths, causing fluctuations in the laser light's brightness, which physicists can detect.