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Mercury, Sep/Oct 2001 Table of Contents

Courtesy of LIGO.

A team of physicists is opening a new window to the universe, the realm of ripples in space-time.

by Kenneth G. Libbrecht

On the scrub desert plain of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington, and in the flat pine forest of Livingston Parish in Louisiana, scientists have constructed two grand new astronomical tools to open a new window to the observable universe. Carved into the wilderness at both sites are immense gravitational-wave antennae, built inside L-shaped above-ground tunnels, with arms four kilometers long. The tunnels house and protect vacuum pipes, which provide clear passage for infrared laser beams. The laser beams bounce off carefully suspended mirrors at the ends of the pipes, measuring minuscule perturbations of space-time produced by passing bursts of gravitational radiation.

These facilities together make up the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO (pronounced LIE-go), a joint project of the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, funded by the National Science Foundation. The LIGO project is the culmination of many decades of research and technology development, and along with its sister projects around the world, we soon hope to usher in an era of gravitational-wave astronomy.