![]() Their field of views are extremely large, making it difficult to pinpoint the source if only one or two instruments happen to be online. LIGO uses two detectors - one in Washington and one in Louisiana - along with Virgo, located in Italy. Patrick Brady, a spokesperson for LIGO and professor of physics compared it to "listening to somebody whisper a word in a busy café it can be difficult to make out the word or even to be sure that the person whispered at all." LIGO (LYE-go) works by detecting incredibly tiny distortions of space from passing gravitational waves (see above). ![]() While a collision of titans releases enormous amounts of energy, the spacetime reverberations produce only weak signals that are difficult to detect. A typical black hole is just 24 miles (42 km) across. ![]() A black hole's density is infinite - if you can get your head around that -and results from the collapse of a single, supergiant star. One day later, on April 26, the LIGO-Virgo network spotted another candidate source that may have been caused by a collision of a neutron star with a black hole. If you could scrape together a teaspoon of neutron star matter it would weigh a billion tons. Registered gravitational waves from what appears likely to be a crash between two neutron stars - city-sized, super-dense remnants that remain after a stars explode as supernovae. ![]() Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory On April 25, the National Science Foundation's ![]()
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