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{ 2016 02 11 }

Seventeen years

 

Congratulations, LIGO! Gravitational waves have been directly detected for the first time. Hulse and Taylor won a deserved Nobel for indirect detection, a measurement 13 years in the making. LIGO was longer in the making than that. This is such an impressive measurement! The first experiment I've worked on with a non-null result.

I am so proud to have worked on this, even for a little while. I gave three years to LIGO, a gravitational wave detector, and fourteen to LISA, a gravitational wave observatory.

Well done, colleagues. I find myself surprisingly affected.

It was good to see so many familiar faces, aged a bit, in the announcement.

Now we need to build LISA, an observatory whose limiting background noise will be these sorts of events, and we shouldn't wait until 2034 to do so.

It makes me no end of sad that the NASA LISA website is marked “maintained for archival purposes only”.

 

Posted by Brent on Thursday, February 11, 2016, at 9:25 AM. Filed under Comment, Science. Follow any responses to this post with its comments RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.