{"id":174645,"date":"2023-10-24T13:22:56","date_gmt":"2023-10-24T18:22:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/ligo-surpasses-the-quantum-limit"},"modified":"2023-10-24T13:22:56","modified_gmt":"2023-10-24T18:22:56","slug":"ligo-surpasses-the-quantum-limit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/ligo-surpasses-the-quantum-limit","title":{"rendered":"LIGO surpasses the quantum limit"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/ligo-surpasses-the-quantum-limit2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), made history when it made the first direct detection of gravitational waves\u2014ripples in space and time\u2014produced by a pair of colliding black holes.<\/p>\n<p>Since then, LIGO and its sister detector in Europe, Virgo, have detected gravitational waves from dozens of mergers between black holes as well as from collisions between a related class of stellar remnants called neutron stars. At the heart of LIGO\u2019s success is its ability to measure the stretching and squeezing of the fabric of space-time on scales 10 thousand trillion times smaller than a human hair.<\/p>\n<p>As incomprehensibly small as these measurements are, LIGO\u2019s precision has continued to be limited by the laws of quantum physics. At very tiny, subatomic scales, empty space is filled with a faint crackling of quantum noise, which interferes with LIGO\u2019s measurements and restricts how sensitive the observatory can be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), made history when it made the first direct detection of gravitational waves\u2014ripples in space and time\u2014produced by a pair of colliding black holes. Since then, LIGO and its sister detector in Europe, Virgo, have detected gravitational waves from dozens of mergers between black holes as well as [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":511,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/511"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174645\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}