Final results from LISA Pathfinder satellite

The final results from the ESA satellite LISA Pathfinder (LPF) have been published today. Using data taken before the end of the mission in July 2017, the LPF team – including researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover and Leibniz Universität Hannover – significantly improved first results published in mid 2016. LPF now has exceeded the requirements for key technologies for LISA, the future gravitational-wave observatory in space, by more than a factor of two over the entire observation band. LISA is scheduled to launch into space in 2034 as an ESA mission and will “listen” to low-frequency gravitational waves from merging supermassive black holes in the entire Universe and tens of thousands of binary stars in our galaxy.