They are the most sensitive
gravitational wave detectors ever built, and this is what they were built to do: there was a 'disturbance in the gravitational force', and the LIGO detectors have felt it!
The first
gravitational wave event was a merger of two black holes, Lundquist said.
As a
gravitational wave passes through the observatory, it causes extremely tiny distortions in the distance travelled by each laser beam.
Media hype also surrounded the first actual detection of
gravitational waves, though this time with the opposite outcome: The detection of GW150914 panned out and revolutionized astronomy.
A long-standing goal of the LIGO project has been the development of multi-messenger astronomy--the near-simultaneous observation of cataclysmic events such as neutron star mergers or supernova explosions in both
gravitational waves and light, providing details about the astrophysics of these phenomena that cannot be revealed through either alone.
The detection marks the first time that a cosmic event has been viewed in both
gravitational waves and light.
WHY IS IT SO HARD TO SEE OR FEEL
GRAVITATIONAL WAVES?
One sun's worth of mass was converted into energy and carried away by the
gravitational waves, LIGO scientists reported in San Diego during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
Gravitational wave observations hold the answers to many deep questions that trouble physics.
The noise at one is not correlated with the noise at the other -- unlike the signal from a passing
gravitational wave, which would occur first at one location and then the other.
highlighted the importance of studying pulsars as another important avenue of
gravitational wave astronomy.
The socalled "Great Metric Tensor" [13-14] is used to deduce a general
gravitational wave equation; which is later applied to a sinusoidally varying mass for a homogeneous spherical distribution of mass.