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### How is it that distortions in space can be measured as distances? [duplicate]

Imagine yourself and anything you're able to perceive to be drawn onto a rubber band. Any means of determining distances would be affected by the stretching/contracting of the rubber band. The ...
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### LIGO discovery: if the space “time” metric is changed, how is it measured? [duplicate]

Regarding the wonderful 2016 news about gravitational waves. Travel time in one arm of the LIGO is ~ 30μs. A gravitational wave affects the arm for some few hundred of these laps. Then for example ...
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### How can gravitational waves be detected when spacetime bends the instruments? [duplicate]

Apologies for the naive question, hoping someone with a proper physics background can explain this in layman's terms (as opposed to the more detailed answers at LIGO flawed by the identical expansion ...
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### LIGO Gravitational waves detection [duplicate]

During the detection of gravitational waves by LIGO machine, why wasn't the laser light used in the detection, also stretched as a result of the stretching of space time fabric?
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### Is there any issue/concern for a slight wavelength shift of the laser light in the LIGO experiments? [duplicate]

A friend and I were having a discussion about the LIGO experiments and were wondering if there is any issue with the laser light undergoing a wavelength shift as a result of the gravitational wave? ...
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### How were gravitational waves discovered? [duplicate]

It was announced today that gravitational waves were discovered. The article gives the following explanation of the experiment: When a gravitational wave passes LIGO, the tunnels deform slightly ...
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### Why does an interferometer with mirrors even work? [duplicate]

My understanding is being thwarted by something basic I am missing. One starts with a light beam that is split into two perpendicular paths. There are two light paths that travel some distance. The ...
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### How does LIGO detect accurate time differences if gravitational waves are also compressing and stretching the light waves-specific confusion below [duplicate]

I was watching this veritaserum which explains my question at 5:55 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iphcyNWFD10 saying that the speed of light is much faster so will pass through the arms multiple ...
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### Are the LIGO observations proof of a black hole merger, and what happened to the black holes?

Recent reports claim that the gravitational waves detected by LIGO match up with the signal expected from two black holes merging as predicted by general relativity. Additionally, the masses of both ...
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### Does frequency of light change in the LIGO interferometer arms?

There are a number of questions on the internet and on this site asking about how the LIGO interferometer measurement works given that the gravitation wave stretches both the length of the ...
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### How do the LASERs in LIGO realize that space has expanded as a gravitational wave passes by?

I read an article on LIGO, and I heard it mentioned that it is a nontrivial argument to say that the effect can be measured by interferometry. What happens to space as the wave passes? Does the light ...
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### How thermal noise is avoided in LIGO?

I think I have understood properly the principle of LIGO, however the sensitivity is around $10^{-18}~\rm m$ of accuracy of distortion. That looks pretty small... just starting with simpler phenomena, ...
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### How does LIGO detect Gravitational Waves if they bend both space and time?

Please note that this is not an inquiry into the mechanisms of technology that LIGO uses to detect gravitational waves. Also, I am not a flat-earther. I was watching physicists vs. flat-earthers ...