Adhikari: Upgraded LIGO could detect signals from ten billion years ago
Rana Adhikari · The Technical Challenges of Measuring Gravitational Waves - Rana Adhikari of LIGO · Y Combinator · Sep 15, 2017 · at 49:54
Rana Adhikari, Caltech physics professor and LIGO researcher, discusses the maximum observational range achievable by current-generation ground-based gravitational wave detectors.
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“With the current systems, you know, as big as they are, if we put in like our best technical hacks into them that we can imagine, we could maybe get to the place where the universe was about a one fifth or one sixth of its current age. So we could look back something like ten billion years into the past, which is pretty great.”
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“If they, I think if they had known how tough it would be, or that it was going to take fifties, five years to have success, probably no one would have started.”
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