A giant space laser triangle carrying golden cubes will listen to the universe

In space no one can hear you scream. But if you have a large and sensitive enough instrument, you might hear gravitational waves that come from far off collissions between black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs. You might even be able to hear the 'ringing' that was left over after the creation of the universe.

The European Space Agency recently gave the go-ahead to build exactly such an instrument: LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna). It is designed to listen to mergers of black holes that measure the size of an entire solar system, the so-called 'supermassive black holes'. Thus far they have remained hidden from scientists.

LISA will also be able to detect the death dance of neutron stars and white dwarfs as they spiral in towards each other prior to a collission. This will be helpful for the field of 'multimessenger astronomy', where astronomers hope to collect both gravitational waves, light and particles from cosmic collissions.

Nora Lützgendorf is the lead project scientist on LISA and I talk with her about the science of LISA and how it will achieve it.