# Ligo Trip Photos



## mattthemuppet2 (Jun 3, 2016)

I went to LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) on the Hanford Reservation outside the Tri-Cities, Washington, with my daughter yesterday on her Explorers field trip. It was especially neat as I saw one of the scientists who is part of that collaboration (Greg Ogin) give a research talk a few weeks back, after they discovered evidence of gravitational waves coming from 2 spinning/ merging black holes a billion light years away.

Anyway, in addition to all the coolness of that, there was also lots of machining eye candy on show, various prototypes or retired equipment, including a seismic table bigger than my dining table that must have been surfaced by an 8in+ flycutter or facemill. I'm just going to post pictures, so if you want explanation of what something is, just ask!

one of the very early bar sensors, a very large round of alu!



an prototype mirror suspension/ control unit





an "amplifying" mirro





the seismic table!





some posters on the set up and findings




a retired piece of vacuum tubing, which goes in the concrete tunnel you can see in the background





one of the retired nuclear reactors at Hanford









the control room with a couple of very patient scientists




now I don't need to say I'm not working to NASA accuracy, I can say I'm not working to LIGO accuracy! They  can measure a difference in length of those arms of 1x10 -19m. Which is pretty small 

model of the 2 spinning black holes that they detected


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## ch2co (Jun 3, 2016)

I'm envious.  It will probably be another couple of years until I get up there to see this facility. I've been interested in this line of research (detection of gravitational waves that were predicted by Einstein over a century ago) since I first saw an article about the big aluminium cylinder in your first picture back in the sixties.  I've watched with baited anticipation at the building of the LIGO arrays (there's also one in Louisiana and yet another similar facility in Italy). The amazing thing is that the device wasn't even considered fully operational when the first "chirp" was seen. A grad student working at night during the final testing phase of the instrument saw the chirp and almost didn't report it to his team! This was the shot heard around the Universe that science had been looking for since it was predicted, we just needed an instrument that was sensitive enough to see this ripple in the fabric of space time itself above all of the background noise.  Thanks for the pictorial tour.

CHuck the grumpy old guy


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## JimDawson (Jun 3, 2016)

Very cool!  Thanks for posting.


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## T Bredehoft (Jun 3, 2016)

Its hard to believe that when I was a child, before 1950, Or maybe 1930, the Milky Way was considered all there was to the universe. Now they have evidence that part of is is 16 Billion Light Years away. And they are not (do not seem to be) speculating just how far away it extends. 

My earliest memory of this says that the Milky Way was part of the Universe....But I definitely remember Nebulae, clouds of gases, one in Orion's belt,


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## mattthemuppet2 (Jun 3, 2016)

you're welcome everyone, it was a super cool trip and I was very lucky to go. My daughter's class needed adult chaperones and I almost ripped the form out of my wife's hand when she mentioned it!

the degree of precision involved is astonishing. Not just all the cool machining and control stuff, but also the fact that they had to grade the 2 arms because of the curvature of the Earth by 4ft at the center and control the effects of gravity on the mirrors (think 2 toothpicks in an orange - they're not parallel to each other). When we were in the control room one of the students asked why the light was moving up and down on one of the monitors (36 total!). The guide explained that was a camera looking at one of the mirrors and the light was moving because the mirrors were oscillating slightly. Not sure why, but it takes hours to "lock down" the mirrors to be able to record data.

that's cool info Chuck, I didn't know about the grad student. He or she must have been blown away. Sometimes the most amazing discoveries are made just by keeping your eyes and mind open.


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## John Hasler (Jun 3, 2016)

T Bredehoft said:


> Its hard to believe that when I was a child, before 1950, Or maybe 1930, the Milky Way was considered all there was to the universe.


Try 1920.  Speculation that the nebulae might be other Milky Ways goes back to 1750.


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## CraigB1960 (Jun 3, 2016)

Nice!  Thanks for posting this!


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## mattthemuppet2 (Jun 4, 2016)

your welcome!


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## ch2co (Jun 15, 2016)

And now, they have detected another cosmic merger of black holes, the second such discovery.

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v9/68

CHuck the grumpy old guy


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## mattthemuppet2 (Jun 15, 2016)

thanks Chuck, I'll get my daughters to read that later, super cool stuff!


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