Educator’s Guide

SSU has developed an Educator’s Guide entitled Direct Observation
of Gravitational Waves for students in grades 6 and higher. It is
available for download in different formats through:

https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-P1600015/public

LIGO Courses

We hope to be able to offer our courses again in the future so stay tuned!

Original material from our 2015 course, LIGO: Waves and Gravity, is available at:

https://universe.sonoma.edu/moodle/course/view.php?id=2

The material includes three chapters with homework assignments:

• Learning More About Light
• Geometry and Gravity for Weak Fields
• Astrophysical Sources of Gravitational Waves as well as several sections of links to free resources.

The entire 2016 course, LIGO: Detecting Gravitational Waves, is
available at:

https://universe.sonoma.edu/moodle/course/view.php?id=3

The material includes five chapters with homework assignments as well as additional resources and references::

• Introduction and Background
• Direct Observations
• LIGO: The Basic Idea
• Sources of Noise
• Signal Extraction

Animated Video

This video was created by Over the Sun, LLC. It uses actual CAD drawings of LIGO to show the path of the laser light through the system, and the response to a (greatly exaggerated) gravitational wave. Scientific oversight was provided by Prof. Lynn Cominsky as part of the NSF grant PHY-1404215, Teaching Einstein’s Universe at Community Colleges.