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Could a lunar seismometer outperform LIGO at pinpointing black holes?
Jacopo Tissino, Filippo Santoliquido, Francesco Iacovelli, Ulyana Dupletsa, Tito Dal Canton, Matteo Ballelli, Ansh Chopra, Luis Enrique Espinosa Castro, Laura Pezzella, Matteo Schulz, Izumi Takimoto Schmiegelow, Jan Harms
June 3, 2026
A gravitational wave antenna on the Moon sweeps a huge arc as it orbits the Sun, and that geometry alone can sharply constrain where a signal came from. Two minutes before GW250114's merger, such an instrument would have pinned the black holes' sky position to 65 square degrees and their chirp mass to 0.0002 solar masses — beating the entire LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA network. The catch: getting the math right requires picking a reference point that slashes the required sampling density tenfold.
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