LIGO relocation would boost gravitational-wave science

After about a decade of operations, during which no gravitational waves were identified, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory’s detectors—two in Hanford, Washington, and one in Livingston, Louisiana— were turned off on 20 October. An upgrade to what will become the Advanced LIGO originally involved increasing the sensitivity at those sites to detect events up to 10 times farther away, thus expanding by 1000-fold the volume of accessible universe. The improvement can be summed up as going from a predicted single event in 30 years to an event every week or so. But by placing one of the Hanford detectors in Australia, signals could be not only seen but their position on the sky determined, says Jay Marx, a particle physicist at Caltech and executive director of LIGO Laboratory, the Caltech-MIT hub of the project. (The full project consists of some 800 scientists from about 80 institutions worldwide.) “After chairing a...