Colliding black holes
As funding and construction of the National Science Foundation's Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatories got under way, NCSA researchers were already hard at work, defining the gravitational wave signatures that LIGO would pick up. These observatories, now complete, are among the most sensitive instruments in the world, able to detect variations in the Earth's gravitational field. Cataclysmic astrophysical events—exploding supernovae or colliding black holes, say—are thought...
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