With the first success of Ligo, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, astrophysicists and cosmologists have a new kind of telescope. What could they hope to see with this new instrument and its successors?
The answers could hardly be more explosive. The instrument that has just identified two black holes in a high-speed dance of death more than a billion light years away could be used to observe phenomena that currently only exist in theory – cosmic strings. Theoretically these strings are many light years in length, moving at the speed of light, thinner than an atom but so massive just an inch would weigh 10 million billion tons.
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