The successful detection of gravitational waves has fundamentally changed astronomy. And now the new frontier is in space. Satellite-based detection systems are currently being developed that will reveal some of the universe’s greatest mysteries. And while the team behind LISA is now developing this observatory in space, it may be outdone by a rival, TianQin, which was developed by the Chinese.
Gravitational waves are really a new window into the universe. They allow us to discover the totally invisible, like the merging of black holes. They also allow us to look into the hearts of some of the most mysterious events in the universe, as in the case of the Kilonovas, whose gravitational waves were caused by the collision of neutron stars.
The capabilities of our ground-based gravitational wave detectors are limited, however. As sensitive as they are, they can only detect relatively high-frequency events – gravitational waves that are short, strong and clearly protrude from the background.
If we want to go deeper into this new domain of astronomy, we have to go into space. Proposed instruments like LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) are big and stable enough to detect things like matter falling into supermassive black holes, the insides of supernovae when they go off, and maybe even gravitational waves emerging from the earliest moments of the Big Bangs echo themselves.
But competition is always a good thing in astronomy, too. LISA, which is slated to be deployed sometime in the 2030s (although it will likely be later), is backed by a Chinese companion, TianQin.
According to a new study, TianQin could outperform LISA in certain situations. It is difficult to predict exactly how these observatories will develop because they have not yet been built. We can still make a few guesses. A team of theorists behind the study created simple models of the behavior of both instruments and pitted them against each other in a competition.
They found that TianQin likely performed better than LISA at low frequencies and the highest frequencies, both of which can measure, while they are equally suitable for medium-frequency observations.
This means that the Chinese observatory may be better suited to capturing gravitational waves from the Big Bang, for example, while LISA may more easily target supermassive black holes.
In both cases, the two planned observatories complement each other, with both paying attention to gravitational echoes in the dark and offering an essential window into an invisible universe.
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