gravitational waves

With the confirmation of gravitational waves less than a decade old, scientists are barreling ahead with new detectors to pick up ever more elusive ripples in spacetime. Fermilab’s MAGIS-100 is one such project that is already underway.

The Siena Galaxy Atlas will be a tool for research into how galaxies form and evolve, gravitational waves, dark matter and the structure of our universe.

From Brazil Culture, November 3, 2021: Fermilab’s Marcelle Soares Santos was included in this impressive exhibit of “Women in Science” curated by the Catavento Museum of São Paulo. The exhibition was conceived to bring to light women who acted and act in a significant way for scientific research and development, presenting, in monumental panels, 12 scientists from different times, nationalities and areas of knowledge. To read in English, click on the title above, right click and hit translate.

A new analysis of the South Pole-based telescope’s observations has all but ruled out several popular models of inflation.

The newly operational KAGRA will bump the number of gravitational-wave observatories to four, which will allow scientists to better triangulate the source of ripples in space-time.

From MIT Technology Review, Oct. 21, 2019: We’ve seen ripples in space-time only when the universe’s biggest events occur. Now there might be a way to spot them ahead of time. MAGIS-100 is a project designed to see whether shooting frozen atoms with lasers can be used to observe ultrasensitive signals that might be stretching through space-time. If successful, it could help usher in a new era of “atom interferometry” that could reveal some of the secrets of gravitational waves, dark matter, quantum mechanics, and other heady topics.

Scientists think that, under some circumstances, dark matter could generate powerful enough gravitational waves for equipment like LIGO to detect. Now that observatories have begun to record gravitational waves on a regular basis, scientists are discussing how dark matter—only known so far to interact with other matter only through gravity—might create these gravitational waves.

Barish explains how LIGO became the high-achieving experiment it is today.

From WTTW’s Chicago Tonight, Oct. 17, 2017: Fermilab’s James Annis is among the panel of scientists who discuss the LIGO/Virgo’s detection of gravitational waves from colliding neutron stars and the optical followup.

From The New York Times, Oct. 16, 2017: This is the first time LIGO has discovered anything that regular astronomers could see and study. One of the group of astronomers who spotted the speck of light was led by Marcelle Soares-Santos of Brandeis University and using the Dark Energy Camera.