This material is shamelessly taken from Alan Weinstein's 2006 lectures on gravitational waves and LIGO, which can be found at the Undergraduate Resources section of the the main LIGO web site .
Views of the two LIGO sites from the air:
The basic idea is to monitor the lengths of two long laser beams.
Do you recognize the figure at the center of this slide?
This is a very tough engineering job.
How are things going?
What do we expect to detect? The CHIRP of a merging binary system.
How far away can we detect such merging systems?
The search for gravitational waves is a team effort -- LIGO is not alone.
You can join the effort via the Einstein@Home screensaver!
