Soumya D. Mohanty

Imagine an orchestra where each musician plays their own part, and the conductor tries to catch a faint rhythm common to all. That's roughly how astronomers search for gravitational waves from pairs of supermassive black holes (weighing billions of suns) circling each other in distant galaxies.

Imagine a quiet room where you need to pick out a single melody among many barely audible rustles. That's roughly what it's like to search for signals from extreme systems of two black holes — one huge, the other millions of times smaller.