his will be good!
Unfortunately, the fourth run will start with only two detectors, meaning better confirmation and above all quick source triangulation will be impossible at first:
“Damage delays restart of Italy’s giant gravitational wave detector
Hunt for cosmic collisions resumes without Virgo detector, limiting research
16 MAY 20235:05 PM BY ADRIAN CHO” [Science]
“Later this month, physicists will resume their hunt for astrophysical monsters: black holes and neutron stars going bump in the dark and emitting ripples in space called gravitational waves. But one of the three detectors that have spotted such waves—Virgo, near Pisa, Italy—has run into technical problems that will delay its restart, 3 years after all the facilities shut down for maintenance and upgrades. For the next few months, just the two detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), in Louisiana and Washington state, will take data, making it harder to pinpoint sources on the sky.
The problem appears to originate not in the upgrades, but in older parts that are creating noise that would drown out many signals, says Fiodor Sorrentino, a physicist with Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) and Virgo’s commissioning coordinator. “But we cannot be 100% sure” before opening the detector, he says. Daniel Holz, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, says such hiccups are normal, although LIGO and Virgo had dodged them. “We’re owed this kind of bad luck because our excessive good luck had to run out.””
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