LIGO

Humans of physics

Enormous scientific collaborations are made up of hundreds upon thousands of individuals, each with their own story. Online collections of profiles, such as Faces of DUNE, the Dark Energy Survey’s Scientist of the Week blog and Humans of LIGO, reveal the sometimes-ignored human sides of scientists.

When LIGO and Virgo detected the echoes that likely came from a collision between a black hole and a neutron star, dozens of physicists began a hunt for the signal’s electromagnetic counterpart.

From Listverse, May 3, 2019: The Dark Energy Camera made this list of 10 brilliant feats of scientific technology, along with LIGO, the Pierre Auger Observatory and the Large Hadron Collider.

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.

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.