https://twitter.com/LIGO/status/1123336957193523204
I'm tempted to point out some remarkable astronomy done before LIGO was ever approved for constructed. Astronomical observations proving that gravitational waves existed.
Astronomers around 1989 showed that the spiraling pattern of neutron stars orbiting one another could only be accounted for by the emission of gravitational waves.
It took a lot to make LIGO and gravitational wave Astronomy a reality. It took quantum optics to make optics even better than the Hubble space telescopes. And, it took some exotic laser physics to make lasers sensitive enough. I mean a kind of squeezed light lasers that comes abut by an interaction with the quantum particles popping in and out of existence of the vacuum(as predicted by quantum electrodynamics - Shroedinger quantum mechanics combined with special relativity - not General Relavity).
The detection of gravitional waves took some pretty exotic technology to make happen. They first detected gravitational waves back in 2016, and then they shut down for an substantial increase in sensitivity, and now will run for a whole year before yet another set of upgrades.
The first month of turning back on since 2016 has shown that for the next year, Astronomers will detect a lot of black hole and Neutron star mergers. I'm hopeful for some super black hole mergers. I actually mentioned this on twitter a few months ago or so, and out of the blue, some Astronomers on twitter showed me that they've already pinpointed some Galactic nuclei that are likely to have supermassive black hole mergers! They even have a date when it will happen! That twitter account has been locked(I have a bad habit of getting twitter accounts locked; i've lost like five twitter accounts now! I've been on facebook, and have not had any problems there . . . really weird!)
- In the next decade or two, Astronomers hope to put up LISA. A gravitational wave detector in space. With this, they could detect gravitational waves from the Big Bang!
