And we work with the Virgo Collaboration that operates a detector in Italy and the GEO600 detector team in Germany. There are two LIGO instruments, one in Louisiana and one in Washington. The LIGO Scientific Collaboration ( LSC ), of which I am a member, is currently made up of more than 1,000 people from dozens of institutions and 15 countries worldwide. My student, two postdocs and I all went to our seminar looking like we had seen a ghost! The rest of our colleagues in attendance were not part of LIGO, so we couldn’t say a word. seminar that same day, we received word from each LIGO observatory that no tests had been performed. I spent the rest of the morning assuming as much. Like everyone else at the time, though, I thought this signal was just a test of the analysis system, called a hardware injection. But I can say that if you have waited for over 12 years for such a discovery, as I have, it certainly is not something to take lightly when it happens. It is difficult to describe the level of anticipation regarding a possible event.
![waves v9 crack team air waves v9 crack team air](https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0963869519306127-gr9.jpg)
Like others on the team, I should have been woken up in the middle of the night when LIGO heard that first gravitational wave – but it was so early in the run that I hadn’t even had a chance to enable my text message alerts! Instead, I read about the event, termed GW150914, on my phone as I walked to campus hours after it had been observed. From those who built and commissioned the advanced LIGO detectors to those who characterized and analyzed the data, we’d all been preparing for decades to make this kind of discovery, but I don’t know if any of us was truly ready for a detection – and on Day One, as luck would have it.
![waves v9 crack team air waves v9 crack team air](https://img.wavescdn.com/1lib/images/products/plugins/preview/vocal-bender.png)
Article contentĪlthough Advanced LIGO had collected data off and on over the summer of 2015, September 14 was slated to be the first official day of its first observing run. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.