Barish - were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017 for the first gravitational wave detection. ![]() "This is a really difficult experiment, and reaching this goal is one of the most difficult parts of it."Īfter several decades of struggles to overcome technological challenges, the chief architects behind LIGO - Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss and Barry C. "The mirrors have to be a factor of 10 billion times more still than the ground at Hanford that we are standing on," Landry told Live Science. Such miniscule displacements can be measured with the help of laser beams that bounce off the mirrors. As a gravitational wave passes through LIGO's facilities, the positions of the mirrors shift by less than the size of a proton. LIGO detects the gravitational waves emitted by such collisions by observing the minute displacement of mirrors that hang at the end of two long tunnels. These cosmic monsters crashed into each other at nearly half the speed of light, at a distance more than 1 billion light-years from Earth. The waves were emitted by two black holes with masses roughly 30 times that of the sun. "I will remember that day for the rest of my life. ![]() In September 2015, LIGO detected the first gravitational waves ever observed. ![]() These ripples, or gravitational waves, carry energy and angular momentum away from the two black holes, causing them to spiral closer and closer toward each other until they eventually collide in one of the most energetic events in the universe. "A black hole warps space-time, and when they circle around each other they create ripples in space-time," said Sheila Dwyer, staff scientist at LIGO Hanford.
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