You can't aim our current grav wave detectors. In a very simplified form, it's two very long tubes with laser in it, you aren't pointing these buildings like you could do with even very large telescopes.

The detectors have different sensitivity depending on the direction of the waves, so if a wave comes from a "bad" direction (perpendicular to both arms, e.g. directly from above), a particular detector might not detect anything, even if the wave is strong.

This is why (amongst many other reasons) it's important to have multiple detectors around the world (e.g LIGO has two locations in the US, you also have Virgo in Italy, and they do collaborate), this way you can assure in theory that you can "see" every wave, no matter which direction it's coming from.

(AFAIK).

> LIGO can't point to specific locations in space Since LIGO doesn’t need to collect light from stars or other objects or regions in space, it doesn't need to be round or dish-shaped like optical telescope mirrors or radio telescope dishes. Nor does it have to be steerable, i.e., able to move around to point in a specific direction. Instead, each LIGO detector consists of two 4 km (2.5 mi.) long, 1.2 m-wide steel vacuum tubes arranged in an "L" shape (LIGO's laser travels through these arms), and enclosed within a 10-foot wide, 12-foot tall concrete structure that protects the tubes from the environment.

> A mirror at the vertex of the arms splits a single light beam into two, directing each beam down an arm of the instrument Mirrors at the ends of the arms reflect the beams back to their origin point where they are recombined to create an interference pattern called 'fringe

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/what-is-ligo

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/ligos-ifo

Intuitively, it would seem that one wouldn't 'aim' a gravitational wave detector. The inputs are omnidirectional, and direction-finding would be accomplished by triangulation based on an array of detectors.

Gravitational waves detectors, just like any kind of antennas have anisotropic sensitivity. By having multiple detectors with different orientations you can determine the source of the signal. But you can't aim them, no, at least not any current or planned ones. They are simply too big (many kilometers) and require extreme stiffness.

Everybody knows of LIGO, but it's actually three detectors that work together, LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA.

A gravitational wave moves at the speed of light. So if you compare arrival times from several widely-spaced detectors, you can get a pretty good idea of what direction the wave came from.

Even a single detector has two arms at 90 degrees to each other, which can give you a rough idea of where in the sky it came from. But now that we have multiple detectors online we get better and better about spotting the origin.

Similar discussion elsewhere on the internet: https://einsteinathome.org/content/how-can-they-aim-ligo

It's a triangulation problem. As long as the two detectors are perpendicular with each other you can triangulate the source of the signal received by both of them.