UofG astrophysicists welcome LIGO funding boost

University of Glasgow researchers are celebrating the announcement of tens of millions of dollars in new funding to advance the science of gravitational wave astrophysics. The US-based National Science Foundation announced today (Thursday 14 February) that Caltech and MIT will share in $20.4m (£15.9m) to upgrade the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), an NSF-funded international collaboration which made history in 2015 after making the first direct detection of gravitational waves. The investment is part of a joint international effort in collaboration with UK Research and Innovation, which is contributing £10.7m, and the Australian Research Council, which is contributing additional funds. While LIGO is scheduled to turn back on this spring, in its third run of the "Advanced LIGO" phase, the new funding will go toward "Advanced LIGO Plus." Advanced LIGO Plus is expected to commence operations in 2024 and to increase the volume of deep space the observatory can survey by as much as seven times. Researchers from the University of Glasgow's School of Physics and Astronomy played a vital role in the development of LIGO's sensitive mirror suspensions, which made possible the first gravitational wave detections, and in the sophisticated data analysis techniques which underpin each detection. Professor Sheila Rowan, director of the University's Institute for Gravitational Research, said: "In the three years since LIGO's first detection of gravitational waves, we've observed a remarkable string of cosmic events including a series of black hole collisions and a neutron star merger, the majority of which would have gone unnoticed here on Earth without the advent of gravitational wave astronomy.