For a gravitational wave to be unambiguously identified, it must be detected by more than one instrument.

ECONOMIST: Fundamental physics

Unfortunately, a passing gravitational wave will make only a tiny change in the distance the laser beams have to travel.

ECONOMIST: Fundamental physics

"This is the first time we see a binary black hole in action, the smoking gun for something that will become a major gravitational wave burst in the future, " says Hasinger.

BBC: Black holes on collision course

Applications tested included the heavyweights of the government scientific community from projects such as MG-RAST (a metagenomics analysis server), the Joint Genome Institute, the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO).

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As the leader of the experimental gravity group at Columbia, he is looking into what happens when two black holes or neutron stars merge in the distant universe, and is collaborating with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, a facility funded by the National Science Foundation and located in Louisiana and Hanford, Wash. that aims to detect cosmic gravitational waves.

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