Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Virgo interferometer
Summary
The Virgo interferometer is a large Michelson interferometer designed to detect gravitational waves predicted by the general theory of relativity. It is located in Santo Stefano a Macerata, near the city of Pisa, Italy. The instrument's two arms are three kilometres long, hosting its mirrors and instrumentation inside an ultra-high vacuum.
Virgo is hosted by the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), a consortium founded by the French CNRS and Italian INFN. The Virgo Collaboration operates the detector and defines the strategy and policy for its use and upgrades. It is composed of around 850 members, representing 142 institutions in 16 different countries. Other interferometers similar to Virgo have the same goal of detecting gravitational waves, including the two LIGO interferometers in the United States (at the Hanford Site and in Livingston, Louisiana) and the Japanese interferometer KAGRA. Since 2007, Virgo and LIGO have agreed to share and jointly analyze the data recorded by their detectors and to jointly publish their results; this agreement now includes KAGRA since 2019. Because the interferometric detectors are not directional (they survey the whole sky) and are looking for signals which are weak and infrequent, simultaneous detection of a gravitational wave in multiple instruments is necessary to confirm the signal validity and to deduce the location of its source.
The interferometer is named after the Virgo Cluster, a cluster of about 1,500 galaxies in the Virgo constellation, about 50 million light-years from Earth. Built as part of a franco-italian effort to detect the gravitational waves predicted by general relativity, it now plays a significant part in the global gravitational wave detector network, as gravitational wave astronomy takes its first steps. It has participated in a number of detections, and periodically undergoes improvements to enhance its sensitivity and increase its performance.
The Virgo experiment is managed by the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO) consortium, created in December 2000 by the CNRS and INFN.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.