"That milestone took more than four decades of breakthroughs and heroic improvements in experimental techniques. But seeing such black-hole 'binaries' has now become routine. The LIGO detectors - alongside their sister observatories Virgo, near Pisa, Italy, and KAGRA, under Mount Ikenoyama, Japan - have roughly doubled their sensitivity over the past ten years, enabling them to monitor a region of the Universe that is twice as wide and contains about eight times as many galaxies."
"US-based gravitational-wave researchers want to build the Cosmic Explorer (CE), an interferometer similar to LIGO, but with L-shaped arms that are ten times longer, stretching 40 kilometres. If it is built and works as planned, the CE should collect 100,000 black-hole mergers each year, essentially spotting them wherever they happen in the observable Universe. These will include events that happened more than ten billion years"
Ten years after the first direct detection, gravitational-wave observatories have progressed from a decades-long experimental effort to routine discovery, with LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA roughly doubling sensitivity over a decade. The enhanced detectors monitor a volume of space twice as wide and containing about eight times as many galaxies, producing detections of binary black holes roughly every three days. Teams in the United States and Europe plan larger, more sensitive facilities such as the 40-kilometre Cosmic Explorer, which could record tens of thousands to 100,000 black-hole mergers per year and detect events from more than ten billion years ago.
Read at Nature
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