Gravitational-wave detector rebooted to sense clashing stars

We are more than ready to hear the plucked strings of space-time. Last Friday, the revamped LIGO took its first observations – a step towards picking up the ripples that Einstein predicted should come from exotic cosmic collisions.

During its original run from 2002 to 2010, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory listened for gravitational waves in a range that included about 100 galaxies. It didn’t find any, probably because the main event it was searching for – the death spiral of two neutron stars – might only happen in a single galaxy once every 30,000 years.

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“The Advanced LIGO detector upgrade meets these requirements for an instrument that will establish gravitational-wave astronomy. It is more than ten times more sensitive, and over a much broader frequency band, than initial LIGO.”

Nice! And needed. So far, gravitational wave detectors have found SFA.

that should be a clue