Damage delays restart of Italy’s giant gravitational wave detector
Later this month, physicists will resume their hunt for astrophysical monsters: black holes and neutron stars going bump in the dark and emitting ripples in space called gravitational waves. But one of the three detectors that have spotted such waves—Virgo, near Pisa, Italy—has run into technical problems that will delay its restart , 3 years after all the facilities shut down for maintenance and upgrades. For the next few months, just the two detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), in Louisiana and Washington state, will take data, making it harder to pinpoint sources on the sky. The problem appears to originate not in the upgrades, but in older parts that are creating noise that would drown out many signals, says Fiodor Sorrentino, a...