Continuing LIGO’s historic breakthrough: After a hiatus, LIGO has recently resumed operations after a significant upgrade. The upgraded version is about 40% more sensitive than its predecessor, allowing it to detect weaker and more distant gravitational waves. The last observation began on April 1, 2023 and is expected to last about two years. During this phase, LIGO will actively search for gravitational waves produced by phenomena such as black hole mergers, neutron star collisions, and supernovae.
“Our LIGO teams have worked hard over the past two years to get ready for this moment, and we are ready: our engineering leads to an official start tomorrow on 04 already. revealed some potential events that we shared with the astronomical agency. community ,” said Albert Lazzarini from Caltech, deputy director of LIGO Labs.
Source: Caltech/Caltech/MIT/LIGO . Laboratory
The collaboration between LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA is crucial to unraveling the mysteries of gravitational waves. These detectors work together to decode the subtle perturbations in spacetime caused by massive objects. To increase the sensitivity of the device, additional vacuum tubes with mirrors were made as part of the upgrade. These vacuum tubes reduce noise and minimize mirror vibration, allowing for more accurate measurements.
“Over the past few months, we’ve identified a variety of noise sources and made good progress in terms of sensitivity, but it’s still far from the design goal.“We believe that achieving the best sensitivity of the detector is the best way to maximize its discovery potential,” said recently elected Virgo spokeswoman Gianluca Gemma.
While Virgo experienced delays in restarting due to technical issues, KAGRA resumed operations on May 24. KAGRA will join LIGO’s ongoing test work prior to commissioning. continue next month. Going forward, LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA is expected to join LIGO-India later this decade, with some parts of LIGO-India built using spare parts from the project. Original LIGO. This collaborative effort demonstrates continued progress in gravitational wave research and the promising future discoveries it holds.
What is LIGO?
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) is an outstanding science experiment and observatory based in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana. Its main goal is to detect gravitational waves, which are waves in spacetime caused by the motion of massive objects. LIGO has played an important role in the field of astronomy since its inception.
LIGO was proposed in 1984 by Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever. Construction of the observatories began in 1994, the first was completed in 2002 at Hanford and the second in 2005 at Livingston. These observatories use laser interferometry, using mirrors placed 4 km apart to detect the slightest changes in distance.
Source: Caltech/Caltech/MIT/LIGO . Laboratory
On September 14, 2015, LIGO made a major breakthrough when it directly detected gravitational waves for the first time. This historic discovery, known as GW150914, is the result of the merger of two black holes 1.3 billion light-years away. Since then, LIGO has continued to make groundbreaking discoveries, including detecting neutron star mergers and collisions between black holes of different masses.
The impact of LIGO’s detection of gravitational waves on astronomy is profound. It has allowed scientists to observe and study some of the most powerful events in the universe, such as the merger of black holes and neutron stars. In addition, LIGO has paved the way for other gravitational wave observatories such as Virgo in Italy, GEO600 in Germany and KAGRA in Japan, which together increase the ability to detect gravitational waves from more sources.
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Source: HIS Education