Gravitational wave hunters will get an ultracool new tool in 2023

We have been detecting gravitational waves since 2015, but there is still much more to learn. The Matter-wave Laser Interferometric Gravitation Antenna will use ultracold atoms to spot ripples in space-time at lower frequencies than ever before

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

A new kind of gravitational wave hunter is set to start up in 2023, and it could also help in the search for dark matter.

Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time created by events such as black holes colliding. They were first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 and first detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US in 2015, almost a century later. Now, we have seen more than 100 gravitational waves, advancing our understanding of black holes and neutron …