To catch a gravitational wave

Advanced LIGO, designed to detect gravitational waves, will eventually be 1000 times more powerful than its predecessor. Thirty years ago, a professor and a student with access to a radiotelescope in Puerto Rico made the first discovery of a binary pulsar: a cosmic dance between a pair of small, dense, rapidly rotating neutron stars, called pulsars, in orbit around one another. Scientists noticed that their do-si-do was gradually speeding up, which served as indirect evidence for a phenomenon pr...