A precisely arranged triangle of three satellites shooting laser beams at each other truly sounds like science fiction. But the European Space Agency (ESA) is set to make this a reality by 2035.
The project, known as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), is like the famous gravitational-wave-discovering LIGO experiment—just in space instead of underground tunnels. Lead by ESA, the project is a collaboration with NASA and a consortium of scientists. ESA recently gave the mission team the official go-ahead to begin construction on the spacecraft in January 2025, with launch planned a decade later. Astrophysicists who work on the mission, like Max Planck Institute astrophysicist Sarah Paczkowski, were overjoyed at the news, describing the mission adoption as “rewarding” and “super exciting.”
“LISA will be sensitive to an as-of-yet unexplored regime of gravitational waves” or ripples in the fabric of spacetime, explains Michael Zevin, an astrophysicist at the Adler Planetarium and part of the LIGO collaboration. Gravitational waves reveal the physics of black holes smashing together, massive supernova explosions, and even the earliest moments of the universe. LISA’s new perspective is “akin to the first time observing the universe in light outside the visible range, such as X-rays or infrared, which enabled an immense amount of science, discovery, and understanding of the cosmos,” he adds.
Since the first detection of gravitational waves in 2016, astronomers have been eagerly exploring the cosmos through this new window. We’ve heard the final moments when two black holes spiral into each other and learned about how the highest energy events in the cosmos—like supernovae and gamma ray bursts—happen by simultaneously spotting light and gravitational waves from a cosmic explosion.
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