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Wednesday, September 17, 2003

UNIVERSAL BINDER

Gravity wave hunt ideal for sensitive types

Physicists in the UK are ready to start construction of a major part of an advanced new experiment, designed to search for elusive gravitational waves. They are already part of two experiments: the UK/German GEO 600 project and the US LIGO experiment (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), both in their commissioning phases. By bringing GEO 600 technology to LIGO, they and their German colleagues from the Albert Einstein Institute are now set to become full partners in Advanced LIGO, a more sensitive observatory that once fully operational should be able to detect a gravitational wave event a day.
First predicted by Einstein's Theory of Relativity, gravitational waves have never been observed, but indirect evidence of their existence has been obtained by measuring the effect of their emission by a binary pulsar system (two neutron stars orbiting each other). The observed effect was found to match predictions.

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