An infographic created by @astronerdika titled “MIRROR, MIRROR, reflecting our LASER beam… what’s the LOUDEST signal gravitational wave we’ve seen?” explaining the gravitational-wave discovery GW250114 and how the observation confirms Hawking’s area law. The visual shows the mirrors in a gravitational-wave interferometer speaking about the loudest event they have seen. There are several illustrations as follows: 1. A simplified diagram of a laser interferometer. A red laser beam from a labeled “LASER source” hits a beam splitter, travels down two perpendicular arms, reflects off round mirrors, and recombines at a labeled “detector.” A label near the top-right mirror reads: “the DETECTOR, signal seen by LIGO Hanford & LIGO Livingston.” 2. An illustration of a binary black hole merger, with two black circles spiraling inward. They are labeled ~34 solar masses and ~32 solar masses. Surrounding spiral lines represent gravitational waves. A nearby caption reads: “the SOURCE, Discovered in 2025, on January 14, at 08:22:03 UTC.” 3. A prominent speech bubble with white text on a purple background states: “GW250114 is the loudest & clearest signal we’ve seen!” A smaller note below reads: “as of January 2025.” 4. Another speech bubble reads: “AND we saw that Hawking was right too!” 5. Visual explanation of Hawking’s Area Law. Two small circles labeled “this BH” + “this BH” are shown to the left of a “<” symbol, pointing to a larger circle labeled “the surface area of the merged BH.” Below there is the explanatory sentence: “GW250114’s remnant event horizon area is larger than the sum of the individual areas.” 6. A section titled “the PAPERS” lists two arXiv references: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08054 and https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2509.08099 Note: This infographic plays off the classic line from Snow White, “Mirror, mirror on the wall…” Here, the “mirrors” are the ones inside the laser interferometer, reflecting light to detect passing gravitational waves.
Mirror, mirror, reflecting our [LASER] beam...
What is the loudest [gravitational wave] signal that we've seen?
It’s #GW250114!
(Yes, it’s been two weeks since it was announced, but I can still celebrate! 🎉 )
#EinsteinWasRight #HawkingWasRight
@ligo.org @egovirgo.bsky.social
