Surveying black holes and neutron stars with gravitational waves

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Black holes and neutron stars are some of the strangest objects in our universe, formed in the supernova explosions at the end of the lives of the most massive stars. Neutron stars contain the mass of the Sun compressed into a sphere only a few tens of kilometres across; so dense that atoms can no longer exist, so the entire star consists of neutrons packed together by gravity. Black holes are thought to be more massive still, and so dense that not even light can escape from beyond their event horizons. These fascinating objects are a physicist's dream laboratory: a place where all our theories are pushed to their limits and beyond. Understanding how they are formed can also shed light on the evolution of the stars that they came from.When two of these objects are found in a binary system, their small size allow them to orbit each other in a few hours or less.According to Einstein's general theory of relativity these systems have so much matter in such a small space that they distort the space-time around them, whipping up gravitational waves that extract energy from the orbit and change the dimensions of everything they pass through. Luckily, by the time they reach us at Earth, these gravitational waves are so weak that the changes in length are equivalent to changing the distance between the Sun and Saturn by one hair's width, far too small to notice. Eventually so much energy is extracted that the objects orbit each other hundreds of times a second before they finally collide, releasing a huge amount of energy that can produce the brightest explosions in the universe if a neutron star is involved, but are completely invisible if only black holes are. Invisible that is, except to gravitational wave observatories, which are designed to measure the distortion of space-time produced by these events throughout the universe. The second generation of these observatories, called Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo, will come online in 2015 and start to make detections of binary collisions soon afterwards. By precisely measuring the distortions produced as a gravitational wave passes by, it will be possible to measure the nature of the binary system that produced it, even when no electromagnetic signal can be seen. Gravitational waves form in effect an entirely new spectrum with which we can observe the universe, opening up new avenues for discovery.The hunt for these gravitational waves is an incredibly exciting field of science. It pushes the limits of what is technologically possible in every part of its design. Knowing that we will soon be observing black holes and neutron stars fuels the curiosity that drives this global effort forward. We are about to open up a new tool that will allow us to observe space-time itself, and will eventually lead to a better understanding of the nature and evolution of the universe.