The Chirp Heard ‘Round the Universe

Analog Devices and LIGO advance science with amazing solutions

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Aerial photo of Caltech/MIT LIGO Lab

At 4AM on September 14, 2015, a gravitational wave was detected for the first time in human history. Its source was two black holes, 1.3 billion light years away, whose violent collision created a release of gravitational-wave power ten times greater than the combined energy of all the stars in the universe. What was behind this ground-breaking event?

Precision engineering at LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory – and innovative technology from Analog Devices. Indeed, it took a precision instrument beyond measure to successfully achieve that goal; an instrument so precise that, metaphorically speaking, if you were to take all the sand from all the beaches on Earth, LIGO could detect the removal of a single grain. Analog Devices was proud to have its converters, temperature sensors, op amps, and more utilized by LIGO.

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