Sentences with phrase «passing gravitational wave»

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.

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.

As passing gravitational waves stretch and compress the space between Earth and the pulsar, the rhythm slightly changes.

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.

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

The phenomenon was observed by two US - based underground detectors, designed to spot tiny vibrations from passing gravitational waves, a project known as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational - wave Observatory, or LIGO.

Weber's detectors, built in the 1960s, used large aluminum cylinders, or bars, that would be driven to vibrate by 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.

A passing gravitational wave will change the lengths of the tubes, which will make the brightness of the recombined light change because light waves in the combining beams will interfere with one another.

From the interference, researchers can compare the relative lengths of the two arms to within 1/10, 000 the width of a proton — enough sensitivity to see a passing gravitational wave as it stretches the arms by different amounts.

Any passing gravitational wave will alter the pattern, which the interferometer will pick up.

This pair of detectors, sitting 3000 kilometres apart in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, use lasers to pick up tiny variations in space - time that could be caused by a passing gravitational wave.

LIGO consists of two gargantuan optical instruments called interferometers, with which physicists look for the nearly infinitesimal stretching of space caused by a passing gravitational wave.

Any passing gravitational wave will slightly distort space - time and lead to a detectable shift in the laser beams.

A passing gravitational wave would generally stretch the arms by different amounts, and that's what the LIGO team spotted.

Weiss realized that output could reveal a passing gravitational wave, which generally would stretch the arms by different amounts.

A passing gravitational wave should slightly stretch one beam while compressing the other.

Also evident was the fact that perfecting the interferometers would be exceedingly difficult: a passing gravitational wave would induce mirror motions 1,000 times smaller than a proton, and these infinitesimal changes would have to be measured.

Sensitive detectors can tell if the length of the arms of a LIGO detector varies by as little as 1/10, 000 the width of a proton, representing the incredibly small scale of the effects imparted by passing gravitational waves.

A passing gravitational wave, however, changes the length of the arms.

Longer devices are better because a given fractional change in distance caused by a passing gravitational wave will translate into a larger absolute change.

Physicists still hope to surf a passing gravitational wave, which would amount to the first direct detection of these entities, in contrast to the indirect effects seen by BICEP2 and Hulse and Taylor.

Sensitive detectors can tell if the length of the arms varies by as little as 1/10, 000 the width of a proton due to passing gravitational waves.