gravitational waves

The LIGO detector uses 4-km-long (2.5-mi) arms. But now, a Northwestern University team is aiming to build a gravitational wave detector small enough to fit on a tabletop, which could detect signals the larger facilities miss.

We’re now getting new gravitational wave detections so often it almost doesn’t seem special anymore. Barely a month into a new observation run, the LIGO/Virgo collaboration has now reported five new events, including what may be the first ever detection of a black hole swallowing a neutron star.

In 2015, a century-old prediction by Einstein was finally proven correct, as gravitational waves were detected for the first time. Now, the facilities behind this discovery, LIGO, are back up and running after a year-long upgrade, with a few new tricks up their sleeves.

Gravitational waves are ripples in the very fabric of spacetime, caused by some of the biggest cataclysms in the cosmos. Now, an international team of scientists has presented the full catalog of these events, gathered over the last few years across two observation runs.

The universe as we know it is made up of three spatial dimensions, right? But some physics models suggest the existence of extra dimensions that we can’t perceive. In an effort to find evidence of these dimensions, researchers have studied gravitational waves and come up empty.

In August 2017, astronomers observed a collision between two neutron stars so powerful it produced gravitational waves, flares in visible light, radio waves, x-rays and a gamma ray burst. Now that things have quietened, astronomers have studied the strange object created in the cosmic collision.

Last year astronomers around the world witnessed the merger of two neutron stars as gravitational waves, light, radio and gamma rays, but the aftermath of the mashup hasn’t played out quite as expected. Rather than fade over time, the afterglow has continued to brighten.

2017 was a busy year for science. Researchers got new tools, doctors got new medicines, and tables were laid with new foods, the ultimate shut-ins got their first glimmer of freedom, and we learned who really will inherit the Earth. Let's look back at the highlights of this year in science.

The precise instruments at the LIGO and Virgo facilities were responsible for past detections of gravitational waves, but now astronomers plan to look for ripples from supermassive black hole collisions using natural detectors in space: pulsars, the “cosmic lighthouses” of the sky.

Gravitational waves are one of the biggest scientific discoveries in recent years, but pinpointing their sources isn't easy. To help with this, NASA is turning to a surprising source – lobsters, whose eyes are being used as a model for new space-based instrument.

A team of scientists has announced the fifth detection of gravitational waves, but there’s a groundbreaking difference this time: the ripples were caused by the collision of two neutron stars, meaning the event was accompanied by light, radio, and other electromagnetic signals for the first time.

The 2015 detection of gravitational waves is one of the most important scientific discoveries in a century. It’s no surprise then that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics to scientists at the LIGO/Virgo Collaboration, for that groundbreaking discovery.