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The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has improved its detection of cosmic events by overcoming quantum noise through advanced “squeezing” technology. This breakthrough will increase its detection rate by 60 percent and pave the way for advancements in quantum technology and physics. Researchers using LIGO achieved a landmark in quantum squeezing. In 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, made history when it made the first direct detection of gravitational waves, or ripples in space and time, produced by a pair of colliding black holes. Since then, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded LIGO and its sister detector in...

On Aug. 14, 2019, a gravitational wave -- a massive ripple through the fabric of space-time -- washed over the Earth. The signal was one of the strongest ever seen by the gravitational wave scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory and Italy's Virgo observatory. After an alert was sent out moments after detection, teams of astronomers across the world turned their telescopes to the point in space that the wave emanated from. But their searches came up empty. No light, no X-rays, no infrared, no gamma rays. On Tuesday, researchers from the LIGO and Virgo collaborations detail their full...

Installation was completed on the world's largest radio telescope on Sunday morning as the last of 4,450 panels was fitted into the center of the big dish. ... In the first two or three years after its completion, the telescope will undergo further adjustment, and during that period Chinese scientists will use it for early-stage research. After that, it will be open to scientists worldwide, said Peng Bo, director of the NAO Radio Astronomy Technology Laboratory. Scientists can also carry out remote control and observation in other cities such as Beijing, more than 2,000 kilometers from the telescope site, said...

How do you build a real-world machine to test the most abstract of theories? Janna Levin talks with Rai Weiss, one of the original designers of LIGO, the four-kilometer-long instrument that has now twice detected the distant reverberations of two black holes crashing into one another. Janna Levin is a theoretical physicist — she works with pen and paper to turn the elegant rules of the universe into theory. Rainer Weiss, or Rai, as he’s known, is an experimental physicist — he thinks about how to find and measure something that may or may not exist outside of theory. Weiss...

Explanation: Just press play to watch two black holes merge. Inspired by the first direct detection of gravitational waves by LIGO, this simulation video plays in slow motion but would take about one third of a second if run in real time. Set on a cosmic stage the black holes are posed in front of stars, gas, and dust. Their extreme gravity lenses the light from behind them into Einstein rings as they spiral closer and finally merge into one. The otherwise invisible gravitational waves generated as the massive objects rapidly coalesce cause the visible image to ripple and slosh...

From the site: "One of the most simplest and interesting ways to explain Gravitational Waves" See video link below.

Explanation: Gravitational radiation has been directly detected. The first-ever detection was made by both facilities of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Washington and Louisiana simultaneously last September. After numerous consistency checks, the resulting 5-sigma discovery was published today. The measured gravitational waves match those expected from two large black holes merging after a death spiral in a distant galaxy, with the resulting new black hole momentarily vibrating in a rapid ringdown. A phenomenon predicted by Einstein, the historic discovery confirms a cornerstone of humanity's understanding of gravity and basic physics. It is also the most direct detection of...

The astronomers who this spring announced that they had evidence of primordial gravitational waves jumped the gun because they did not take into proper account a confounding effect of galactic dust, two new analyses suggest. Although further observations may yet find the signal to emerge from the noise, independent experts now say they no longer believe that the original data constituted significant evidence. Researchers said in March that they had found a faint twisting pattern in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the Big Bang’s afterglow, using a South Pole-based radio telescope called BICEP2. This pattern, they said,...

There’s no way for us to know exactly what happened some 13.8 billion years ago, when our universe burst onto the scene. But scientists announced Monday a breakthrough in understanding how our world as we know it came to be. If the discovery holds up to scrutiny, it’s evidence of how the universe rapidly expanded less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. “It teaches us something crucial about how our universe began,” said Sean Carroll, a physicist at California Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the study. “It’s an amazing achievement that we humans,...

On Monday, Dr. Guth’s starship came in. Radio astronomers reported that they had seen the beginning of the Big Bang, and that his hypothesis, known undramatically as inflation, looked right. Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second...

Sensitive search fails to find ripples in space, but boosts hopes for future hunts.Supernovas, such as the one which created the Crab Nebula, should send out bursts of gravity waves.NASA The hunt for gravitational waves may not have found the elusive ripples in space-time predicted by Albert Einstein, but the latest results from the most sensitive survey to date are providing clear insight into the origins and fabric of the Universe.General relativity predicts that gravitational waves are generated by accelerating masses. Violent yet rare events, such as a supernova explosion or the collision of two black holes, should make the...

Astronomers have detected a pair of supermassive black holes that are closer together than any previously discovered. The two giants are dancing around each other with only about 24-light-years between them and are expected to collide in the very distant future. "That's more than 100 times closer than any pair found before," said astronomer Cristina Rodriguez from the University of New Mexico and Simon Bolivar University in Venezuela. Rodriguez was part of the team made the discovery using the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a continent wide system of 10 linked radio-telescopes. The finding was announced today....

Last Updated: Tuesday, 8 November 2005, 20:27 GMT E-mail this to a friend Printable version Science to ride gravitational waves By Jonathan Amos BBC News science reporter, Hanover Jim Hough believes the hunt will soon deliver Many expect it to be one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of our age: "There'll certainly be a Nobel Prize in it for somebody," says Jim Hough.The UK professor is standing on a farm road in Lower Saxony, Germany, with a crop of beet on one side and sprouts on the other. But the real interest lies at his feet - with some...

Public release date: 8-Sep-2004 Contact: David Reid david.reid@iop.org 44-794-632-1473 Institute of Physics UK scientist gambles on gravitational waves At the Institute of Physics conference Photon 04 today, Professor Jim Hough, one of the UK's leading scientists, revealed that he thinks high street bookmakers are crazy to be offering odds of 100-1 on whether Gravitational Waves (wrinkles in relativity) will be discovered before 2010. He has placed a personal bet of £25 – the maximum Ladbrokes allowed him to stake. The available odds were quickly cut from an initial offering of 500-1. Professor Jim Hough, from the University of Glasgow and...