IMAGINE bizarre shapes—giant loops, spirals and balls of
wool—made of delicate materials, all spinning sedately in space. Not an
interplanetary sculpture park, but an array of detectors that could one day net
one of the greatest prizes in physics: gravity waves. “We are seriously
suggesting using such structures to detect cosmic gravitational waves,” says
Robin Tucker of the University of Lancaster.
Gravity waves are ripples produced in the fabric of space-time by a massive
body, such as a black hole, undergoing violent acceleration. As gravity waves
pass by, they alternately stretch and squeeze space, so one way to…
