Earth is awash in gravitational waves.

Over a six-month period, scientists captured a bounty of 39 sets of gravitational waves. And over the next two years, they hope to hear even more — from delayed echoes of cosmic carnage.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Canada's National Research Council (NRC) and other institutions wrote more than 200 documents and stories to explain the hows and whys of detecting gravitational waves. But to understand their implications, you have to understand where they come.

Starlight is a friend to a Gravity Wave Detector. Studying Advanced LIGO LIGO is operated by the European Gravitational Observatory and its U.S. counterpart every few months, looking down on a warped path of space-time that stretches more than 17 billion miles wide. Instruments thousands of miles apart measure this deformed patch of space-time and and fire laser pulses between them. Excited vacuum fluctuations NASA LIGO Nobody is blindly following the footsteps of Advanced LIGO alone. Each observatory learns something new and reinforces the others' work. Scientists at both Observatories are monitoring 40 to 50 hours of data per second, or about 20 terabytes per hour. The data not only reveal when the artifacts are there, but also how dense they are, their latitude and longitude — and details as precise as the location of the first star discovered by Roger Penrose in 1960 citing gravitational waves (PNAS). Early clues Soon after LIGO's 2009 update, second-time observers were able to pick up almost-perfect echoes of gravity waves passing by the noisy observatory's mirrors. These points of odd behavior did not conform a physical manifestation of gravity waves, but they did sit a hardy puzzle piece in the scientists' larger puzzle. Aquire all the potential BEAM signature Some possible signature beamed energy will arrive from as far as a quarter of a billion light-years away. In addition to estimated frequencies there are too many details to go into. However, studying these laser transmitter modes positively demonstrates some 85 percent of LIGO's secret beam. (Researchers are still unwilling to say lest they trigger a correction.) To learn more about what is here, you need some second- and third-hand knowledge of gravitational waves, as well as background knowledge on the work LIGO has done. What is known is that gravitational waves have only been observed seconds after the photons are produced, and after they slam into neutrons, billionths of a billionth of a second later. Again, this means that the signal comes from incredibly dense objects, and the particles with properties that can not
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