The unique gravitational wave signal travelled 650 million light-years to get to the LIGO Livingston Observatory in Louisiana. Researchers determined the signal came from the merger of two objects.

The LIGO set-up consists of three interferometers in two separate locations — 4-km-long interferometers located in Hanford, Washington State and Livingston, Louisiana (see Fig. 1 inset ...

The LIGO detector, sitting incongruously in the vast woodland of Livingston in Louisiana, was designed to detect the gravitational ripples across the Universe created by cataclysmic cosmic events.