This post is part of a series about quick questions and answers about the Virgo experiment and the science of gravitational waves. Do you have a quick question? Tell us and we will reply!
How sensitive is Advanced Virgo?
Advanced Virgo will be sensitive to length changes in the 3-km arms which are on the order of a billionth of a billionth of a meter, about 1/1000th of the diameter of a proton! Advanced Virgo will be able to detect signals from the merger of two neutron stars up to a distance of around 1 billion light years, and much further away for the merger of a binary system including a black hole. Advanced Virgo will be sensitive to gravitational waves in a very broad frequency range, from about 10 to 10,000 Hz
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