Developed by companies ranging from industry heavyweights General Electric (GE) and L - 3 Communications to smaller firms such as QinetiQ, millimeter
wave detectors work in one of two ways: active or passive.
Although Virgo is less sensitive than LIGO, having a third gravitational
wave detector working to measure these rumbles in space - time boosts the precision of trying to locate which galaxy the black holes collided in.
Not exact matches
Pinkesh has a PhD in physics from Caltech during which he
worked on LIGO, the gravitational
wave detector.
Four times in the past 2 years, physicists
working with mammoth gravitational -
wave detectors have sensed something go bump in the night, sending invisible ripples through spacetime.
LIGO should also provide new, rigorous tests of Einstein's general theory of relativity, and —
working with other gravitational
wave detectors due to come online in the near future — pinpoint precisely where in the sky the
waves are coming from.
Further ahead, we might see more sensitive gravitational
wave detectors,
working at shorter wavelengths than LIGO.
Trimble, who now
works at the University of California, Irvine, notes that Weber
worked on his gravitational
wave detectors even after the National Science Foundation (NSF) cut off his funding in 1987 and shifted its focus to developing LIGO — the agency ultimately spent more than $ 1 billion on it.
Last September, that dream came true as 1000 physicists
working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational - Wave Observatory, two huge
detectors in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, sensed a pulse of
waves radiated by two massive black holes as they spiraled into each other a billion light - years away.
Last September, that dream came true as 1000 physicists
working with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational - Wave Observatory (LIGO), two huge
detectors in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, sensed a pulse of
waves radiated by two massive black holes as they spiraled into each other a billion light - years away.
They contributed to the
work of canceling out the other myriad noises picked up by the twin LIGO
detectors in Hanford, Wash., and Livingston, La., that weren't gravitational
waves.
«With this first joint detection by the Advanced LIGO and Virgo
detectors, we have taken one step further into the gravitational -
wave cosmos,» said David H. Reitze, who
works at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and is executive director of the LIGO Laboratory, in a statement.
Professor Mavalvala
worked with researchers at the US - based underground
detectors Laser Interferometer Gravitational -
wave Observatory (LIGO) Laboratory to build sophisticated sensors to detect gravitational ripples created from the collision of two black holes some 1.3 billion years ago and had been hurtling through space to reach Earth on September 14, 2015.
TKF: Matt, part of your
work involves figuring out the fundamental limits for LIGO and for future gravitational
wave detectors.
Indian scientists made direct contributions — ranging from designing algorithms used to analyse signals registered by
detectors to ascertain those from a gravitational
wave to
working out parameters like estimating energy and power radiated during merger, orbital eccentricity and estimating the mass and spin of the final black hole and so on.
But Harry Collins's detailed
work on the history and sociology of gravitational
wave detection is a counterexample to that thesis: The field's pioneer, who became a heretic for claiming to detect the
waves with an apparatus generally believed to be orders of magnitude too insensitive (and inexpensive), was refuted in print and challenged at meetings in a scientific but fairly gentle fashion (given the stakes for those trying to raise money for more - sensitive
detectors).