Researchers have developed and tested a new locking method for gravitational wave detectors that will advance the discovery of distant black holes and neutron stars colliding.

Researchers from ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) nodes at The University of Western Australia, the Australian National University and the University of Adelaide co-authored the study published in Physical Review D.

Lead author Dr. Jian Liu, from UWA’s School of Physics, Mathematics and Computing, said gravitational wave detectors, such as LIGO, detected ripples in space-time created by colliding black holes by measuring changes in distance 1,000 times smaller than the width of a proton.