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LIGO

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LIGO is a giant ruler that measures how gravitational waves stretch and squeeze space. Two long arms of a laser beam are compared: if a wave passes, one arm becomes slightly longer than the other.

History

The idea of the detector goes back to the pioneering work of Joseph Weber in the 1960s, but it was only in 2015 that the advanced LIGO interferometer, built under the leadership of Rainer Weiss and others, first detected gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes.

How it works

A laser beam is split into two beams traveling along perpendicular 4-kilometer arms. Reflecting off mirrors, the beams meet and cancel each other out, but the slightest asymmetry in lengths — due to a gravitational wave — disrupts the perfect cancellation, producing a signal.

💡 LIGO's sensitivity is such that it detects length changes ten thousand times smaller than the size of a proton — like measuring the distance to the nearest star with the accuracy of a human hair's thickness.
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Rainer WeissJoseph Weber
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