> Each observatory has two light storage arms that are 4 kilometers in length. [...] A passing gravitational wave will slightly stretch one arm as it shortens the other. [...] Even with such long arms, the strongest gravitational waves will only change the distance between the ends of the arms by at most roughly 10⁻¹⁸ m.
With the nominal hair value being 75 µm, `apt install qalc` tells me that's
That's for the gravitational waves we can detect from LIGO. These new ones, as I understand it, are being detected by changes in pulsar frequency over 15 years of measurements - so they have a pretty different character than the ones wikipedia's talking about... I don't know how that translates to anything that makes any sense tho
> Each observatory has two light storage arms that are 4 kilometers in length. [...] A passing gravitational wave will slightly stretch one arm as it shortens the other. [...] Even with such long arms, the strongest gravitational waves will only change the distance between the ends of the arms by at most roughly 10⁻¹⁸ m.
With the nominal hair value being 75 µm, `apt install qalc` tells me that's
so a change in length 7'500'000'000'000 times smaller than the width of a hairhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair%27s_breadth