Home▸Special Relativity▸Gravitational Wave Sky Localization: Detector Triangulation (2D)

Gravitational Wave Sky Localization: Detector Triangulation (2D Sky Map)

Interactive 2D gravitational-wave sky-localization map: watch the light-travel-time delay bands from the real LIGO Hanford, LIGO Livingston and Virgo baselines overlap on a draggable, zoomable flat sky projection to pin down a merger's true direction, exactly like the probability maps LIGO/Virgo send to telescopes.

Special Relativity2DAdvanced60 FPS📱 Mobile-adapted⇄ 3D version

LIGO's twin detectors and Virgo don't point at the sky like a telescope — they triangulate it. Because a gravitational wave crosses the Earth as a plane wavefront, the tiny light-travel-time delay between when it hits Hanford, Livingston and Virgo encodes the direction it came from. This 2D sibling draws the real localization bands for all three baselines directly on a flat, pannable, zoomable sky map — the same style of "probability sky map" LIGO/Virgo circulates to telescopes — and measures the true overlap area on the map itself instead of approximating it, so you can see exactly how three overlapping rings, fattened by timing uncertainty, narrow a gravitational-wave event down to a patch of sky small enough to search for an electromagnetic counterpart.

⚙ Under the hood

2D companion to the 3D detector-triangulation sim: the same real Hanford/Livingston/Virgo light-travel-time delay bands, drawn directly on a draggable, zoomable flat sky map instead of a WebGL globe, with the true three-band overlap area measured cell-by-cell on the map rather than approximated.

gravitational wavesLIGOVirgotriangulationastrophysicsmulti-messengersky map

2D · HTML5 Canvas 2D · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install