WA senator fighting to save Nobel Prize-winning Tri-Cities observatory

KENNEWICK – The LIGO Hanford Observatory in Eastern Washington and its twin observatory in Louisiana could both remain open thanks to the work of Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., on a spending bill approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday.

Murray, the vice chair of the powerful committee, succeeded in adding a provision to the fiscal 2026 appropriations bill that includes the National Science Foundation that would direct the agency to continue operating both observatories.

They work together to detect ripples in space and time, or gravitational waves, passing through the Earth from cataclysmic events in space.

The Trump administration’s proposed budget for fiscal 2026 called for shutting down either the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory at Hanford near the Tri-Cities or an identical LIGO observatory in Livingston, Louisiana.

It also called for reducing the budget for the two LIGOs from $48 million to $29 million in the coming fiscal year.

Working together also helps to determine the area of the sky that contains the source of the waves.

“President Trump’s boneheaded request to shut down a LIGO observatory is yet another attack by an administration that has shown themselves to be openly hostile to Nobel Prize-winning scientific research for no discernible reason,” Murray said in a statement after the vote of the Senate Appropriations Committee. LIGO made scientific history

In 2015, the two LIGOs made scientific history with the first detection of gravitational waves from space passing through the Earth. The detection provided physical confirmation of the existence of gravitational waves nearly 100 years after a prediction by Albert Einstein.

The matching vibration data at both the Washington and Louisiana sites confirmed that the infinitesimal movement detected at both was from gravitational waves reaching Earth from a violent event in space. The ripples through space and time came from a collision of two black hole 1.3 billion years ago.

The finding led to a Nobel Prize in Physics for the work of three U.S. professors emeritus to design and build the two observatories.

In nearly a decade since the first detection, the LIGOs have made about 300 detections of gravitational waves.

An international coalition that also includes observatories in Japan and Italy announced this week that a November 2023 detection made only at the U.S. LIGOs had been verified as the most massive collision of black holes ever observed.

The gravitational waves detected came from the collision of two black holes, one with a mass 100 times that of the Earth’s sun and the other with a mass 140 times that of the sun, to create a final black hole with a mass 225 times that of the sun.

The detection could challenge current theories of stellar evolution.

A fact sheet by the international coalition, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, described the detected event in a fact sheet as “both extraordinary and puzzling to interpret.”

It is “a potent reminder that the cosmos still holds many surprises, and we are only just beginning to uncover them,” it said.

One LIGO employee posted online that the Trump administration’s proposed closure of one of the LIGOs “would be like inventing the microscope, seeing a cell for the first time, and then discarding it.”

The Tri-City Development Council said the proposal to close one of the observatories, “an incredible asset to the scientific community,” was concerning.

“TRIDEC and many others in our community worked hard to support the creation of LIGO decades ago, and we’re tremendously proud of the discoveries that have been made there over the last 10 years,” said David Reeploeg, TRIDEC vice president of federal programs. “Sen. Murray clearly understands LIGO’s importance, and we are extremely grateful for her efforts to ensure their great work continues in the future.”

The Senate spending measure not only prohibits closure of either LIGO, but also calls for investment in their infrastructure and detection capabilities, including technology development recommended by the Advisory Committee for the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate.

The Senate bill must next be considered by the full Senate, and the House also must pass a spending plan that will be reconciled with the Senate plan for fiscal ’26.

Senators worked together to find common ground in the Senate sending bill that included LIGO, Murray said.

“I worked in a bipartisan way to make sure our appropriations bill resoundingly rejects this detrimental and shortsighted proposal and instead reaffirms our support for the continued operation of LIGO’s Hanford observatory,” she said.

But Senate bipartisanship to reach agreement on spending plans is threatened by the rescission package that Republicans passed early Thursday morning, which approved canceling spending earlier approved by Congress which President Trump opposed, Murray told the committee Thursday.

“It’s no secret that the path to advancing more of our bills is going to be harder because of the unprecedented, partisan rescissions bill that Republicans just passed,” said Murray said in the committee hearing. “It’s a dangerous new precedent.”

Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, has said he plans more partisan cuts, Murray said.

Murray was disturbed enough about the rescissions vote, plus Republican action on an amendment unrelated to LIGO in the fiscal ’26 spending bill, to vote against the spending bill’s passage out of committee Thursday.

Republicans had recessed discussion on the bill for several days until they had the votes to overturn an amendment that would have moved the FBI headquarters to Maryland as planned under a completed bidding process.

The relocation was opposed by the Trump administration.