LIVINGSTON, La. — About a mile and a half from a building so big you can see it from space, every car on the road slows to a crawl. Drivers know to take the 10 mph (16 km/h) speed limit very seriously: That’s because the building houses a massive detector that’s hunting for celestial vibrations at the smallest scale ever attempted. Not surprisingly, it’s sensitive to all earthly vibrations around it, from the rumblings of a passing car to natural disasters on the other side of the globe.
As a result, scientists who work at one of the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) detectors must go to extraordinary lengths to hunt down and remove all potential sources of noise — slowing down traffic around the detector, monitoring every tiny tremor in the ground, even suspending the equipment from a quadruple pendulum system that minimizes vibrations — all in the effort to create the most “silent” vibrational spot on Earth.
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