NASA’s Laser Interferometer Space Antenna

The LISA satellite is a proposed joint NASA and the European Space Agency mission to study gravitational waves.

What are Gravitational Waves?

Gravitational waves were first theorized by Albert Einstein. They are created during events such as supermassive black hole mergers, or collisions between two black holes that are billion times bigger than our Sun. These collisions are so powerful that they create distortions in spacetime, known as gravitational waves.

Gravitational waves detectable by the LISA mission could also come from other distant systems including smaller stellar mass black holes orbiting supermassive black holes, known as Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals (EMRIs).

This movie shows a simulation of the merger of two black holes and the resulting emission of gravitational radiation. The very fabric of space and time is distorted by massive objects, which is shown here by the colored fields. The outer sheets (red) correspond directly to outgoing gravitational radiation, which was recently detected by the NSF’s LIGO observatories. Credit: NASA/C. Henze

What do Gravitational Waves tell us?

There are many astrophysical phenomena that are either very dim or completely invisible in any form of light that astronomy has relied on for 400 years. Gravitational waves are a powerful new probe of the Universe that uses gravity instead of light to take measure of dynamical astrophysical phenomena. Studying gravitational waves gives enormous potential for discovering the parts of the universe that are invisible by other means, such as black holes, the Big Bang, and other, as yet unknown, objects.

LISA will complement our knowledge about the beginning, evolution and structure of our universe.

A Different Frequency Range from Different Objects

The gravitational wave spectrum covers a broad span of frequencies. LISA operates in the low frequency range, between 0.1 mHz and 1 Hz (compared to LIGO’s frequency of 10 Hz to 1000 Hz). The difference means that the waves LISA is looking for have a much longer wavelength, corresponding to objects in much wider orbits and potentially much heavier than those that LIGO is searching for, opening up the detection realm to a wider range of gravitational wave sources.

LISA has three spacecraft that form an equilateral triangle in space where the sides of the triangle, also called LISA’s “arms”, extend about a million miles. Therefore, from space, LISA can avoid the noise from Earth and access regions of the spectrum that are inaccessible from Earth due to these extremely long arms. The gravitational wave sources that LISA would discover include ultra-compact binaries in our Galaxy, supermassive black hole mergers, and extreme mass ratio inspirals, among other exotic possibilities.

The Entire Spectrum

We aim to study the entire gravitational wave spectrum, covering a range of gravitational wave sources using experiments on

See more here: lisa.nasa.gov

Header image: NASA / ESA

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