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The European Space Agency and NASA have given the green light to the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) project. This is a huge space-based gravitational wave detector set up to detect the ripples in spacetime that occur when the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies collide with other supermassive black holes. object.
The detector consists of three spacecraft floating 1.6 million miles (2.5 million kilometers) apart, forming a triangle of laser light that can detect distortions in space caused by space-shaking impacts. neutron star and Black Hole.
This interferometer follows the same principles as the existing ground-based LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) experiment. Gravitational waves were first detected in 2015. But increasing LISA’s size by a million-fold will allow it to detect lower-frequency gravitational waves, revealing cosmic collisions that LIGO currently cannot access.
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“Ground-based instruments using laser beams over distances of several kilometers can detect gravitational waves coming from events involving star-sized objects, such as supernova explosions or the merger of a superdense star with a stellar-mass black hole. Research requires us to go into space,” said Nora Lützgendorf, LISA lead project scientist. stated in a statement. “Thanks to the long range that LISA’s laser signals reach and the excellent stability of its instruments, we will be able to explore gravitational waves at lower frequencies than is possible on Earth, and at different scales up to the dawn. will reveal the events of “time.” ”
Gravitational waves are shock waves that occur in space. spacetime When two very dense objects, such as a neutron star or a black hole, collide.
The LIGO detector detects gravitational waves by detecting small distortions in the fabric of space-time as they pass through Earth. The L-shaped detector has two arms with two identical laser beams inside, each 2.48 miles (4 kilometers) long.
When gravitational waves hit the shores of space, the lasers in one arm of the LIGO detector compress and the other arm expands, alerting scientists to the presence of gravitational waves. But the small scale of this distortion (often a few thousandths of the size of a proton or neutron) means that the detectors need to be extremely sensitive. And the longer these detectors are, the more sensitive they are.
LISA’s three-spacecraft fleet, which will begin construction in 2025, will carry three Rubik’s cube-sized gold and platinum cubes that will beam laser beams at each other’s telescopes millions of miles apart. will be irradiated.
As the satellites track Earth in their orbits around the sun, any small disturbances in the path lengths between the satellites are recorded by LISA and sent back to scientists. Researchers will then be able to use the precise changes in each beam to triangulate where the gravitational disturbances came from and direct optical telescopes for further investigation.
And because gravitational ripples occur even before supermassive objects make contact, LISA will alert scientists months in advance of an impact being visible with optical telescopes.
The detector’s unprecedented sensitivity also opens a window into some of the faintest ripples coming from the dawn of the universe, an event in the catastrophic aftermath of the Big Bang, and questions some of cosmology’s biggest and most pressing questions. You’ll probably want to explore some of them.
The telescope was built as part of a collaboration between ESA, NASA and international scientists and is scheduled to be lifted into the sky aboard an Ariane 3 rocket in 2035.
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