There’s a new entrant in the competition to develop ever-tinier instruments that can detect changes in our planet’s gravitational field — a tabletop device roughly the size of two smartphone stacked together.
Created by a team of researchers in China, the instrument has been used to measure the Earth’s tides over the course of several days, physicist Pu Huang of Nanjing University and his colleagues report in the Mar. 22 Physical Review Letters.
Researchers have long sought to build lightweight and cost-effective gravity-measuring instruments. Called gravimeters, such devices can detect tectonic plates shifting, sense the movement of underground water, reveal hidden oil and gas reserves, and track magma within volcanoes to provide data for predicting eruptions, along with many other applications.
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