A newly upgraded, half-billion-dollar instrument is getting ready to create a new picture of the universe by listening for ripples in space caused by gravity waves.

In the latest in our series on Big Science projects, Quirks & Quarks producer Jim Lebans looks into the Advanced LIGO project. Advanced LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory, is a huge gravity wave detector that is attempting to investigate and understand how space itself is vibrated and distorted when objects, such as neutron stars and black holes, are jostled in violent collisions and explosions.

Canadian scientist Dr. Mike Landry, of the California Institute of Technology, is the Lead Scientist on the LIGO Hanford Observatory, one of two LIGO facilities in the United States, and he serves as our tour-guide to the immense and delicate experiment.

- Advanced LIGO
- LIGO Hanford Observatory
- Science news story