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  • WHERE I WORK

Using sound to explore events of the Universe

Wanda Diaz Merced analyses gravitational waves from explosions of massive stars by converting them into ‘chirps’.
By
  1. Davide Castelvecchi
Portrait of Wanda Díaz-Merced, puerto rican astronomer working works at the European Gravitational Observatory in Pisa Italy.

Wanda Diaz Merced is a computer scientist and astrophysicist with Virgo near Pisa, Italy. Credit: Enrico Sacchetti for Nature

I am standing in front of Virgo — a gravitational-wave observatory near Pisa, Italy, where I work as a computer scientist and astrophysicist — facing one of its 3-kilometre-long arms, in which a laser bounces between two mirrors in an internal pipe. The arms sense tiny changes in space-time (a model that fuses the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time into a four-dimensional entity) when gravitational waves arrive from the distant Universe.

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Nature 597, 144 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02347-3

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