A few weeks ago in mid September, LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory in Livingston Parish, began their science run. They began collecting data.
“We had an engineering run before that science run that was about a month long,” says Joe Giaime, the director of LIGO. The engineering run helped LIGO prepare for the science run. In fact, LIGO has been preparing for this data collection since 2010.
“One of the cool things about LIGO,” Giaime says, “is that we’re measuring something extremely interesting and cutting-edge science, but it’s something you can explain—it’s length!”
Detecting tiny changes in length could allow LIGO to observe gravitational waves, which has never been done before.
Almost 100 years ago, Albert Einstein developed the theory of general relativity. The theory predicted that the interaction between extremely massive objects in space will emit gravity waves, warping space-time in the process.
So two black holes or neutron stars that orbit around each other then coalesce, that super energetic, unimaginably crazy process can create ripples in space-time. They can come through here and what happens is that teeny tiny changes in lengths can be observed.
“So we’re measuring something to the precision one-ten thousandth the diameter of a proton,” Giaime says.
LIGO’s mission is two-fold. First, they want to prove that gravitational waves are detectable in the first place.
“But the ‘O’ in LIGO stands for observatory.”
And that’s LIGO’s second job—to observe some of the most violent interactions between celestial objects in the universe.