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Gravitational wave astronomy has been one of the hottest new types of astronomy ever since the LIGO consortium officially detected the first gravitational wave (GW) back in 2016. Astronomers were excited about the number of new questions that could be answered using this sensing technique that had never been considered before. But a lot of the nuance of the GWs that LIGO and other detectors have found in the 90 gravitational wave candidates they have found since 2016 is lost.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Researchers have a hard time determining which galaxy a gravitational wave comes from. But now, a new paper from researchers in the Netherlands has a strategy and developed some simulations that could help narrow down the search for the birthplace of GWs. To do so, they use another darling of astronomers everywhere\u2014gravitational lensing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Importantly, GWs are thought to be caused by merging black holes. These catastrophic events literally distort space-time to the point where their merger causes ripples in gravity itself. However, those signals are extraordinarily faint when they reach us\u2014and they are often coming from billions of light-years away.\u00a0<\/p>\n Detectors like LIGO are explicitly designed to search for those signals, but it\u2019s still tough to get a strong signal-to-noise ratio. Therefore, they\u2019re also not particularly good at detailing where a particular GW signal comes from. They can generally say, \u201cIt came from that patch of sky over there,\u201d but since \u201cthat patch of sky\u201d could contain billions of galaxies, that doesn\u2019t do much to narrow it down.<\/p>\n \n