LIGO Livingston is located in Livingston Louisiana, in a vast, humid, loblolly pine forest.  Home to one of LIGO's two gravitational wave detectors, our facility operates in tandem with LIGO Hanford to listen for the faint whispers of gravitational waves from the most energetic events in the universe.  LIGO Livingston is also home to LIGO's Science Education Center, which hosts schools, teacher workshops, tours and monthly Science Saturdays - where the public is invited to explore the science and engineering that underpin our quest to study the universe via gravitational waves.

For the first time, scientists have directly detected gravitational waves — ripples in space and time — in addition to light from the spectacular collision of two neutron stars. This marks the first time that a cosmic event has been viewed in both gravitational waves and light.

On September 14, 2015 at 5:51 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (09:51 UTC), the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, USA both measured ripples in the fabric of spacetime – gravitational waves – arriving at the Earth from a cataclysmic event in the distant universe. The new Advanced LIGO detectors had just been brought into operation for their first observing run when the very clear and strong signal was captured.