The gravitational wave signal, an audio chirp, deftly proved Einstein’s nearly 100-year-old prediction and opened the door to a new age of multi-messenger astrophysical research.

These advanced upgrades were completed in 2015, and LIGO promptly broke the big scientific news it was designed for: Gravitational waves had been found! Taking lessons from its first decade of operations, LIGO greatly revamped its design, and plans for Advanced LIGO were born. At each observatory, the 2 1/2-mile long L-shaped LIGO interferometer uses laser light split into two beams that travel back and forth down the arms. The Science Education Center at Livingston opened in 2006, and construction began on a new Exploration Center at Hanford last year.Ī technician works on one of LIGO's optics. LIGO also became a resource for teachers and families in surrounding communities. LIGO was setting itself up to be an incredibly sensitive device, able to detect the tiniest of tiny distance changes between its arms (shorter than one ten-thousandth the width of a proton!) and able to reliably distinguish between vibrational noise and real signals. Early findings helped theorists “rule out” certain models meant to describe neutron stars and even the Big Bang, refining our understanding of the universe. And while LIGO didn’t find evidence of gravitational waves with its original design, it was still helping to answer important questions. Since LIGO has been in operation, it has supported researchers and students working on complex astrophysical questions. When the decade-long construction process for the pair of facilities was completed in 1999, observations could finally begin. With two observatories so far apart, scientists could be more confident that something detected by both facilities was a real signal, and not local vibrations in the Earth. LIGO is actually two sister facilities, one located in Hanford, Washington, and the other in Livingston, Louisiana. Read on to learn more about the NSF-funded facility that finally provided direct confirmation of the existence of gravitational waves and has given us a new way to look at what happens when black holes collide. This tiny phenomenon would obviously be very difficult to observe directly, but a massive event such as a black hole collision could theoretically produce such a detectable result – if you had a sensitive enough way to measure it.Įnter LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. Instead, a gravitational wave occurs when the fabric of space-time itself waves or vibrates. Unlike a regular wave of light or even an ocean wave of water, a gravitational wave is not carried by any particles. The gravitational waves that result from colliding black holes were first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916. And when a black hole collides with another black hole, space itself moves. The matter around some black holes are sources of huge amounts of electromagnetic radiation - the radiation enables us to “see” the black holes. Formed from the explosive collapse of a massive star, a black hole is a monster that consumes everything that comes too close, including light. The creation of a black hole is one of the most violent events in the universe.

Black hole theory