The new observatory so big it can’t be built on Earth

By Dr. Becky

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AD | Go to https://ground.news/drbecky to stay fully informed with the latest Space and Science news. Save 40% off the Vantage plan through my link for unlimited access | The European Space Agency are currently building LISA, the next generation of gravitational wave detectors. It’s an observatory so big that it can’t be built on Earth. LISA will have 3 satellite detectors arranged in a triangle each separated by 2.5 million km - that’s 6.5 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. It’ll use lasers fired along that triangle to detect gravitational waves, ripples through space itself caused by two black holes merging together. It's been 11 years since we detected the very first gravitational wave signal caused by two black holes merging 1.4 billion light years away, that detectors here on Earth managed to pick up on 14th September 2015. Since then we’ve detected almost 400 gravitational wave signals from merging black holes somewhere out there in the Universe. So if we’ve

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