After 3 Years of Hiatus, LIGO Is Finally Back! New Era For Gravitational Waves

what exactly happened for the past three years where is all of this headed and why should we all be super excited well let's start with the obvious you might have realized that there haven't really been a lot of detections when it comes to gravitational waves since early 2020 and that's following some groundbreaking discoveries and really important detections after 2015 after the initial discovery of gravitational waves

coming from black hole collisions and you might have realized by now that the answer in this case was covet for safety reasons the researchers suspended to work on reliable detectors and it started to actually do something a little bit different in the process the design is taking this time to upgrade them even further to the point where they've now become exceptionally sensitive even able to detect

things we've never been able to hear before which might not sound like important is ridiculously important for one simple reason this graph this graph shows us the amount of various detections throughout vigo's Lifetime and unfortunately what this doesn't show us is that the initial observations started as far back as early 2000s that's basically when Lego was initially made and began its attempts to detect any kind

of gravitational waves but back then it was just not sensitive enough to pretty much find anything in 2010 the Lego temporarily shut down in order to give it a few upgrades and by 2015 both Lego facilities were ready for their third run it's known as O3 once again as you can see from here the first two runs were not very successful and so by the end

of Run 3 in March of 2020 the ligo has confirmed 90 separate events that you can find out more about from this study right here and so it was actually that upgrade in 2015 that didn't just allow ligo to discover black hole collisions finally but it also allowed the scientists to discover 89 other collisions in some cases from really unexpected events including black hole Neutron Star

Collision and a few collisions that even today are difficult to explain you can learn more about these in some of the previous videos in your description but all three only run for approximately 11 months and as it was about to begin its new run the events in 2020 created a bit of a logistical nightmare for the scientists studying gravitational waves and so instead they focused on

basically improving this as much as they can as well as adding new facilities that are now actually functional as well and so as of today as of 2023 we also have the Italian Observatory known as Virgo that you see right here and the Japanese kagra kamioka gravitational wave detector both of which are essentially joining in shortly in order to begin that fourth run and so apart

from having two libel detectors we now have another one in Europe and another one in Japan which dramatically improves sensitivity and also allows the scientists to triangulate the exact position where these gravitational waves very likely came from but more importantly the upgrades from the last three years dramatically improve the sensitivity of the detectors themselves for example one major upgrade is an addition of an optical cavity

that improves what's known as Quantum squeezing or basically reduces the overall noise of quantum properties of Light which then dramatically improves resolution the actual concept is a little bit Technical and so we'll probably talk about this in some of the future videos specifically describing the techniques used in these particular discoveries which means that you should probably subscribe if you want to learn more and on top

of this they also dramatically improved the analysis techniques and the software used for the processing of all of this data and the main reason for this is the ability to detect all of this in almost real time this I just want to be able to detect these gravitational waves know exactly where they possibly came from and then release all of this data to various telescopes that

can observe this in various frequencies in order to discover what caused this so far this actually has only been done once back in 2017 when the scientists observed gradation waves mixed with visible light from a collision of two neutron stars but this single event allowed the scientists to enter so many different questions for example it proved that both gravitational waves and light travel at the same

speed which actually created a major problem for a lot of ideas and a lot of propositions that are not part of standard physics for example in mod modified Newtonian Dynamics they're not supposed to travel at the same speed and so the moment this kind of presents this particular hypothesis as somewhat erroneous while at the same time it also allowed them to study the expansion of the

universe and of course confirm the source of some of the most powerful emissions such as gamma reverse and with these new sensitivities and these new abilities all of these detectors are now going to be able to see things that we've never even thought possible and honestly this is sort of vaccine mostly because exactly 100 years before the first detection back in 1916 that's when Einstein first

predicted their existence but he never hoped or even thought we would ever be able to find them and after the construction of these facilities it still took 15 years of upgrades and various experiments before the first attraction was finally confirmed and so now almost eight years after we're basically beginning a completely new era and at the moment it's kind of difficult to imagine what the scientists

are going to discover in the next few years for example the scientists are really hoping to be able to detect individual neutron stars that are spitting fast enough to produce gradational waves not too far away from planet Earth and in this case this would be continuous waves that we should be able to hear no matter what it would even resemble a kind of a background noise

that would be somewhat difficult to tell apart at first but the scientists would eventually realize that it's coming from a neutron star somewhere out there it's also quite possible that we might see other unusual black hole binaries which will finally help this scientists answer the question of why exactly so many strange binaries were detected previously or specifically answer their origin where these strange black holes coming

from you can learn more about this unusual mystery in one of the videos in the description but in a nutshell a lot of these black holes seem to be of a mask that we do not expect some of them are way too massive how they actually formed is not a question we can answer right now and for all we know we might even find some other

unusual objects such as the mysterious cosmic strings which are expected to produce gravitational waves as well either way whatever happens the next years are definitely going to be super exciting for the ingredients with physics and intriguing even as I'm making this video there have already been several detections and one has already been confirmed as a matter of fact it seems to have occurred during the testing

phase even before the mission started you can learn more about this in some of the links in the description but in a natural it was a collision between a black hole and a neutron star that seems to be the farthest detected so far once again suggest seen that ligo has become exceptionally sensitive ironically back in 2015 the first detection of black hole collisions was also done

during the testing phase and was completely unexpected just like what happened now and though black hole neutron star collisions had been seen before within just a couple of days the Sanchez have discovered six potential candidates with many already most likely confirmed and that was before the mission even started once the fourth observation period began as you can see right here the detections started to happen almost

every single day with the most recent one that you see right here also very lucky being a neutron star and a black hole collision with the Assumption now being that these events should happen at least once every week with black hole collisions happening almost every day and a lot of additional collisions happening in between as well and so basically when it comes to gravitational waves there's

not going to be a huge amount of new data and that's for the next few years sometime in 2030 we might have a fifth Observatory this time in India because the Indian Parliament recently approved all of the funding required for the construction of such a facility and then a few years later the cosmic Explorer facility which we'll talk about in some of the future videos and

the European Einstein telescope might also join the network which means that within the next 10 years detecting a variety of gradation waves coming from everywhere might be just as frequent and just as common as detecting radio frequencies with modern telescopes or in other words we're entering a completely new era for various types of astronomy astronomy that's not limited by where you are by the amount of

light in the night skies or by the amount of gas that might be hiding something behind in this case these waves go through everything and are able to show us the universe like we've never seen it before there's actually even been a suggestion that we could maybe use the Earth's magnetic field and specifically the minute deviations that happen inside the field and inside the Eva announced

ballast that could actually be influenced by various gravitational waves as well and thus serve as a gravitation with detector something that could be detected even with modern telescopes and something we'll Explore More in some of the future videos but until these feature discoveries or until more exciting detections from Lego or unusual discoveries that nobody expected that's pretty much all I wanted to mention check out previous

videos on this topic in the description below subscribe share this with someone who loves learn about space and Sciences come back tomorrow to learn something else and maybe support this channel on patreon by your internet membership or by buying the wonderful percentage you can find in the description stay wonderful see you tomorrow and as always bye thank you [Music] foreign