LIGO’s Successor Approved; Will Discover Incredible New Sources Of Gravitational Waves
Meet LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. Yes, it’s giant LIGO, in space, and it’s happening!
“Einstein’s gravitational theory, which is said to be the greatest single achievement of theoretical physics, resulted in beautiful relations connecting gravitational phenomena with the geometry of space; this was an exciting idea.” -Richard Feynman
Three times over the past two years, LIGO has directly detected gravitational waves: the ripples in spacetime created as accelerating masses change their position in a gravitational field. Every set of massive motions in a back-and-forth, periodic manner creates these ripples, whether it’s a human moving their fists outward from their chests, a spinning pulsar undergoing a starquake, a supernova explosion, or two masses orbiting each other. While LIGO is most sensitive to detecting the gravitational waves from binary black holes in the final stages of inspiraling and merging, the fact is that any mass orbiting any other creates these same waves, and that the overwhelming majority of orbits take much longer than the fractions-of-a-second that LIGO is sensitive to. That’s what LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, is designed to detect. And yesterday, in…
