I saw a talk, given by a prominent astrophysicist at Harvard, at university last year concerning the event rates for the current and forthcoming generations of LIGO. Apparently, for this incarnation of LIGO, with the sensitivity of the electronics available, there will be approximately 2 events recorded over the life of the detector. Yes, two events, ever. This takes into account the probability that a sufficiently massive gravitational interaction (two black holes ramming into each other, or the inspiral of two neutron stars) occurs sufficiently close to the Earth that we can detect it.
Y'all should know, though, that the next generations of LIGO are already "in the slot", and they promise to increase the event rates quite a bit. The whole trick is to isolate the mirrors as much as possible from disturbances that aren't gravity waves. Fortunately, there are very clever people working on the problem as we speak.
BTW...perhaps the best isolation would be to shoot the whole Michelson interferometer mess up into orbit. I'm pretty sure that some guys at NASA are working on this too. It's worthwhile to check out the LIGO page. Set
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Y'all should know, though, that the next generations of LIGO are already "in the slot", and they promise to increase the event rates quite a bit. The whole trick is to isolate the mirrors as much as possible from disturbances that aren't gravity waves. Fortunately, there are very clever people working on the problem as we speak.
BTW...perhaps the best isolation would be to shoot the whole Michelson interferometer mess up into orbit. I'm pretty sure that some guys at NASA are working on this too. It's worthwhile to check out the LIGO page. Set