If our civilization collapses, extraterrestrial archeologists can look at this and be impressed. Three satellites following the Earth in an equilateral triangle, each 2.5 million kilometers from the other two. Each contains two gold cubes in free-fall. The satellites accelerate just enough so they don't get blown off course by the solar wind. The gold cubes inside feel nothing but gravity.

Lasers bounce between each cube and its partner in another satellite, measuring the distance between them to an accuracy of 20 picometers: less than the diameter of a helium atom! This lets the satellites detect gravitational waves — ripples in the curvature of spacetime — with very long wavelengths, and correspondingly low frequencies.

It should see so many binary white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes in the Milky Way that these will be nothing but foreground noise. More excitingly, it should see mergers of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies as far as... the dawn of time, or whenever such black holes were first formed. (The farther you look, the older things you see.)

It may even be able to see the "gravitational background radiation": the thrumming vibrations in the fabric of spacetime left over from the Big Bang. These gravitational waves were created before the hot gas in the Universe cooled down enough to become transparent to light. So they're older than the microwave background radiation, which is the oldest thing we see now.

It's called LISA - the Laser Interferometric Satellite Antenna. And we're in luck: ESA has just decided to launch it in 2035.

@johncarlosbaez let me be the second “Wow!”

@CascadeTommy - I've been amazed by this experiment ever since I heard about it. Back in 1999 I wrote this:

"The idea is to orbit 3 satellites in an equilateral triangle with sides 5 million kilometers long, and constantly measure the distance between them to an accuracy of a tenth of an angstrom - 10⁻¹¹ meters - using laser interferometry. The big distances would make it possible to detect gravitational waves with frequencies of .0001 to .1 hertz, much lower than the frequencies for which the ground-based detectors are optimized. The plan involves a really cool technical trick to keep the satellites from being pushed around by solar wind and the like: each satellite will have a free-falling metal cube floating inside it, and if the satellite gets pushed to one side relative to this mass, sensors will detect this and thrusters will push the satellite back on course.

I don't think LISA has been funded yet, but if all goes well, it may fly within 10 years or so. Eventually, a project called LISA 2 might be sensitive enough to detect gravitational waves left over from the early universe - the gravitational analogue of the cosmic microwave background radiation!

The microwave background radiation tells us about the universe when it was roughly 10⁵ years old, since that's when things cooled down enough for most of the hydrogen to stop being ionized, making it transparent to electromagnetic radiation. In physics jargon, that's when electromagnetic radiation "decoupled". But the gravitational background radiation would tell us about the universe when it was roughly 10⁻³⁸ seconds old, since that's when gravitational radiation decoupled."

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week143.html

week143

@johncarlosbaez Numbers on this scale break my brain. Is that last sentence saying, basically, 38 seconds after the creation of the universe?

@Archnemysis - Not 38 seconds, 10⁻³⁸ seconds. As others have said in different ways, that means the gravitational background radiation was released about 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds after the Big Bang! Check out my timeline of the very early history of the Universe to put this in context:

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/timeline.html#bang

timeline

@johncarlosbaez @CascadeTommy

"..may fly within 10 years"

Sigh, that hurts a bit. I recently spoke with some frustrated mission planners at ESA. It appears that juggling budgets, 22 member states and the scientific community seems to be quite the thankless job.

@gnarf - it's a very tough job. But the spacecraft do eventually fly... some of them, at least.

@CascadeTommy

@johncarlosbaez @CascadeTommy now I understand, so the gold cube is inside in a vacuum so that it does not get pushed around? And the outside is steered to keep it in the middle. Just hope it does not touch the sides!

@revk @CascadeTommy - the satellite is steered around so the 2 gold cubes floating inside it do not touch the walls of the vacuum chamber. The cubes are in free fall. The satellite is *almost* in free fall - it's just very gently pushed by solar wind - so it only needs tiny thrusters to make very gentle course corrections that keep the cubes where they belong. This technology has been tested by LISA Pathfinder, and it worked.

https://spacenews.com/lisa-pathfinders-success-boosts-likelihood-of-future-gravity-wave-observatory/

Lisa Pathfinder's success boosts likelihood of future gravity-wave observatory

European scientists on June 7 said the Lisa Pathfinder technology-demonstrator satellite, launched in December to determine if current technologies were sufficient to justify investment in a full-scale gravitational-wave observatory, has far surpassed expectations and should lead to a larger mission around 2034.

SpaceNews
@johncarlosbaez ESA's GOCE mission was also a pathfinder for LISA. It successfully zeroed out the atmospheric drag it felt as it "flew" through the thermosphere. This enabled its gravity gradiometer to make ultrasensitive measurements of the Earth's gravitational field, so sensitive that, in combination with good satellite altimetry data, it was able to map deep ocean currents. https://www.esa.int/esapub/bulletin/bulletin133/bul133c_fehringer.pdf