Unraveling Cosmic Secrets
The team of scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO for short, at the Hanford Site Observatory in Washington state were conducting routine research when they detected what appeared to be a group of gravitational waves. The Hanford Site was established around 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project, a research effort by US scientists to end the second world war by producing an atom bomb. Plutonium manufactured at the site was used to make Fat Man, the ordinance used in the bombing of Nagasaki Japan in 1945. A major Superfund effort was undertaken in 1989 to clean up the mess left by the inevitable mishandling of fissile material by the US Army. The last plutonium reactor, dubbed the N Reactor, was shut down and stopped generating electricity in 1987, the nearby Columbia River having been dammed over eleven times and supplying a better alternative for many years. LIGO was built in late 1994 and has been operating as a gravitational wave observato...