How does a space interferometer work? #shorts

By Dr. Becky

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If instead you want to detect the ripples from supermassive black hole mergers, the kinds we find at the centres of galaxies anywhere from a million to 10s of billions of times heavier than the Sun, then you need an interferometer that’s sensitive to the much bigger wavelength, lower frequency gravitational waves given out by orbiting supermassive black holes. It means you need an observatory bigger than the Earth to do this. Which is a huge engineering challenge. But ESA aren’t one to back away from a challenge. So they’re now working towards LISA, the laser interferometer space antenna. The plan is to use the same interference trick as LIGO, but your interferometer is now three spacecraft in a triangle separated by 2.5 million kilometres, all trailing the Earth in its orbit around the Sun, resulting in this amazing triangular dance. Now the technique that LISA will use does differ slightly from ground based detectors like LIGO which use mirrors to reflect the laser beams back

Tags: dr beccy, astronomie, physiks