Gravitational waves detected 100 years after Einstein’s prediction – video folows
American University contributes to noise-reduction technology in LIGO detectors
For the first time, scientists have observed ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves, arriving at the earth from a cataclysmic event in the distant universe. This confirms a major prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity and opens an unprecedented new window onto the cosmos.
Gravitational waves carry information about their dramatic origins and about the nature of gravity that cannot otherwise be obtained. Physicists have concluded that the detected gravitational waves were produced during the final fraction of a second of the merger of two black holes to produce a single, more massive spinning black hole. This collision of two black holes had been predicted but never observed.
The gravitational waves were detected on Sept. 14, 2015 at 5:51 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (9:51 UTC) by both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, USA. The LIGO Observatories are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and were conceived, built, and are operated by Caltech and MIT. The discovery, accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters, was made by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (which includes the GEO600 Collaboration and the Australian Consortium for Interferometric Gravitational Astronomy) and the Virgo Collaboration using data from the two LIGO detectors.
American University and partners fine-tune optics
American University is a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. AU currently is the sole university in Washington, D.C. to participate in LIGO and is led by Gregory Harry, assistant professor of physics.
“The detection of gravitational waves marks the beginning of a new way of observing the universe,” said Harry, one of the authors of the detection paper published in Physical Review Letters. “Now that physicists have evidence that LIGO detectors can detect gravitational waves, it is exciting to think about how much we will likely learn about the nature of gravity.”
At AU, researchers work to fine-tune the optical materials used in the LIGO detectors. Mirrors used in the detectors have reflective coatings. Over time, researchers realized the coatings limited the detectors’ sensitivity because of thermal vibrations. Harry’s team helped to develop improved coatings that allowed for greater sensitivity. Experimental research by Harry’s team will continue to focus on new and improved ways to further reduce noise.
Since 2011, more than 10 AU undergraduate students have participated in LIGO research at AU, including two who contributed research to the gravitational waves discovery and are now physics Ph.D. candidates working on LIGO at universities in Scotland and New York. The AU LIGO group is also involved in public outreach and is developing an “Optics Olympiad,” which will bring D.C. public schools students to campus to share in the excitement of LIGO research.
American University is proud to have worked with many outstanding scientists at other universities to have brought LIGO to the sensitivity to make this detection. The list includes Georgia Tech, California State University-Fullerton, Columbia University, Stanford University, University of Oregon, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, Carleton College, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Penn State University, Hobart & William Smith Colleges, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Trinity University, and Whitman College.
Teamwork leads to discovery
The discovery of gravitational waves was made possible by the enhanced capabilities of Advanced LIGO, a major upgrade that increases the sensitivity of the instruments compared to the first-generation LIGO detectors, enabling a large increase in the volume of the universe probed–and the discovery of gravitational waves during its first observation run. The U.S. National Science Foundation leads in financial support for Advanced LIGO. Funding organizations in Germany (Max Planck Society), the U.K. (Science and Technology Facilities Council, STFC) and Australia (Australian Research Council) also have made significant commitments to the project. Several of the key technologies that made Advanced LIGO so much more sensitive have been developed and tested by the German UK GEO collaboration. Several universities designed, built, and tested key components for Advanced LIGO: The Australian National University, the University of Florida, Stanford University, Columbia University of New York, and Louisiana State University.
LIGO research is carried out by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), a group of more than 1,000 scientists from universities around the United States and in 14 other countries. More than 90 universities and research institutes in the LSC develop detector technology and analyze data; approximately 250 students are strong contributing members of the collaboration. The LSC detector network includes the LIGO interferometers and the GEO600 detector. The GEO team includes scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute, AEI), Leibniz Universität Hannover, along with partners at the University of Glasgow, Cardiff University, the University of Birmingham, other universities in the United Kingdom, and the University of the Balearic Islands in Spain. Significant computer resources have been contributed by the AEI Atlas cluster, the LIGO Laboratory, Syracuse University, and the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.
LIGO was originally proposed as a means of detecting these gravitational waves in the 1980s by Rainer Weiss, professor of physics, emeritus, from MIT; Kip Thorne, Caltech’s Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, emeritus; and Ronald Drever, professor of physics, emeritus, also from Caltech. Virgo research is carried out by the Virgo Collaboration, consisting of more than 250 physicists and engineers belonging to 19 different European research groups: 6 from Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France; 8 from the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy; 2 in the Netherlands with Nikhef; the WignervRCP in Hungary; the POLGRAW group in Poland and the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), the laboratory hosting the Virgo detector near Pisa in Italy.
###
To learn more about the discovery, visit the official LIGO Scientific Collaboration website at http://www.ligo.org
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Do we have any idea how many gravitational wave refugees we’ll be dealing with in 10 years? Has Dr. Mann discovered a correlation between tree rings, human released carbon and gravitational waves? Is the U.N. doing anything about this?
And, of course we have the obligatory “woman in charge” placed there via PC. Position “given” not via any other reason than possessing the “right” organ and taking credit for it all. What a complete joke science has become.
Christian – are you really in a position to know the credentials and abilities of the woman in question? Or are you making unjustified assumptions based on prejudice?
A sailing friend works on the project in Washington State. We have been observed consuming ethanol when we are safely ashore. Last fall after a few jello shots he shared that he was giddy about events at work but a lot of work remained before he could publicly talk about it.
My life’s work involved the practical application of converting mass to energy. It is not a theory anymore. Two aspects that help identify junk science. Fear mongering and things that sound too good to be true. CAGW and radiation are fearmongering. Energy scams that require large investment to get ‘free’ energy is an example of the latter.
This is not to say science does not involve risk and cost money. Of course everything does.
For those who haven’t actually learned any general relativity (most here, I suspect from the posts) there are a few things worth pointing out about the main article, and many similar press coverages:
Opening sentence – “For the first time, scientists have observed ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves.”
Gravitational waves were observed (albeit indirectly) by Taylor and Hulse as far back as 1974. They received a Nobel Prize in 1993 for their work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSR_B1913%2B16
LIGO would also work for, say, a pair of orbiting neutron stars … in fact, for any violent merger of a strongly gravitating system. The “mystical” nature of black holes, their misunderstood singularities, and any other “odd” features – factual or ignorance-based nonsense, is not of significance when it comes to gravitational waves.
That gravitational waves exist is a given, according to relativity, is not the big deal here. (If the Sun were to mysteriously disappear, the Earth would continue in its orbit for 8 minutes 20 seconds around “nothing” until the information that the Sun was no longer there arrived… via gravitational waves). The fact that their weak “ebb” can be detected and that measurements are in accordance with theoretical calculations, is the big deal here. LIGO, LISA, BICEP2 and similar instruments may provide a whole new set of tools to probe the universe and reveal details hitherto simply not observable on the electromagnetic spectrum – gravitational wave astronomy.
“The detection of gravitational waves marks the beginning of a new way of observing the universe” – indeed!
More detailed resources here: http://arxiv.org/ftp/gr-qc/papers/0211/0211084.pdf
Thanks for trying to inject some sanity. After reading some of the comments, I was about to go relativisticly ballistic, possibly generating my own gravity waves.
Unfortunately the “little bit of knowledge ->dangerous thing” begins to manifest itself on such topics rather quickly. Same happened for
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/01/05/mysterious-radio-signals-from-space-are-much-better-test-of-einsteins-general-relativity/
“(If the Sun were to mysteriously disappear, the Earth would continue in its orbit for 8 minutes 20 seconds around “nothing” until the information that the Sun was no longer there arrived… via gravitational waves”
I’m sorry, but that isn’t correct, is it? The earth is attracted to where the sun is NOW, not where it was 500 seconds ago. The earth accelerates to a point 20 arc seconds in front of the visible location of the sun – where the sun will appear to be in 8.3 minutes.
Neptune is attracted to where the sun is NOW, not to where it was 15,000 seconds ago. Gravitational attraction is virtually instantaneous. If the planets were not attracted to the sun’s instantaneous position, they would be drifting away. They aren’t.
@Matt Schilling
“Gravitational attraction is virtually instantaneous.”
That means at the speed of light. It takes that amount of time (8min 20sec) for the Earth to “feel” any change from the Sun.
You are incorrect. First, obviously “instantaneous” does not mean “at the speed of light”. More importantly, the earth would “feel” the absence of the sun’s gravity instantly, not in 8.33 minutes.
The earth is NOT attracted to where the sun appears in the sky; it is attracted to a point 20 arc seconds in front of where the sun appears in the sky – where the sun will appear to be in 8.33 minutes.
Photons arriving from the sun do not travel on a path parallel to the line of attraction between the sun and earth.
Matt Schilling writes “The earth is attracted to where the sun is NOW, not where it was 500 seconds ago.”
The Earth has no idea the sun exists. It reacts to the vector sum of all forces acting upon it. The gravitational attraction of the sun is largely time invariant and is exerted everywhere. So whether the Earth is experiencing the sun’s gravity instantaneously or after an 8 minute delay makes no difference because either way the force vector is exactly the same.
I believe if the sun vanished, we would not know it for 8 minutes and that includes its gravitational force.
As always, you are free to think something else.
The planets in our solar system revolve around the sun. They are influenced by each other’s gravity, but they revolve around the sun. It is, after all, the “solar” system – 98% of the mass of the solar system resides in the Sun.
Light from the sun takes 15,000 seconds to reach Neptune. Yet, Neptune is attacted to the current position of the Sun, not to where it was 15,000 seconds ago. We can tell this from its actual orbit – if Neptune and the Sun were attracted to old, incorrect locations, Neptune’s orbit would be affected measurably. No such effect has been observed. There is no aberration of gravity in our solar system akin to the aberration of light.
“Light from the sun takes 15,000 seconds to reach Neptune. Yet, Neptune is attacted to the current position of the Sun, not to where it was 15,000 seconds ago. We can tell this from its actual orbit – if Neptune and the Sun were attracted to old, incorrect locations, Neptune’s orbit would be affected measurably. No such effect has been observed. There is no aberration of gravity in our solar system akin to the aberration of light.”
Sorry, but you are incorrect. If the Sun were to (somehow) mysteriously move or disappear, it would take Neptune 15,000 seconds to find out about it. Basic relativity.
Good heavens!
“Neptune is attacted to the current position of the Sun, not to where it was 15,000 seconds ago. We can tell this from its actual orbit “
Where exactly was the sun 15,000 seconds ago?
“Good heavens!” was a good pun Michael 2.
You asked where the sun was 15,000 seconds ago? Not where it appeared to be in the sky. The aberration of light is not a new or arcane concept. The earth is falling toward a point 20 arc seconds in front of where the Sun appears in the sky – to where the sun is, yet won’t appear to be, for 500 seconds. The gap grows wider for the more distant planets.
Matt Schilling wrote: “You asked where the sun was 15,000 seconds ago? Not where it appeared to be in the sky.”
My daughter once insisted there was no air. I decided that in due time when it became necessary and useful to understand the properties of air that she would then learn about air. That came with swimming lessons.
Until then, I spared myself the ordeal of trying to teach her about air.
Or you about planets, gravity and cosmology.
in response to Matt Schilling:
I see where you’ve obtained your astronomy.
https://www.libertariannews.org/2012/11/27/does-the-earth-circle-the-sun-the-real-answer-may-surprise-you/
Some of his other marvelous inventions and ideas: Free energy is here — only 2.8 million dollars per megawatt! (his idea of “free” and mine differ widely). https://www.libertariannews.org/2016/01/27/free-energy-is-here/ follow the link: “Brilliant Light Power has developed a commercially competitive, nonpolluting source of energy from water. A SunCell™ catalytically converts H2O-based solid fuel directly into brilliant light which is converted to electricity using photovoltaic panels.” (a sucker is born every minute).
The problem with your analysis is confusing the apparent motion of the sun as a changing angle relative to the rotating surface of the Earth with actual movement of the center of gravity of the solar system.
An observer of the solar system positioned somewhere above the ecliptic, he observes that the sun does not move. The Earth is attracted to its actual, permanent, unchanging location and it doesn’t make the slightest difference whether that attracting force reached Earth’s orbit instantaneously, or at the speed of light, or at any other speed so long as it does eventually get there.
Likewise a photon emitted by the sun has a return vector that must necessarily point directly to the sun because it cannot point anywhere else. The ray points to the sun.
Photons are not raindrops. http://cseligman.com/text/history/bradley.htm
You can speed through photons as fast as you like, you’ll get some redshift or blueshift, but their vectors must always point back to the source — and it makes no difference that it was 8 minutes ago because the source is not moving. Where it was 8 minutes ago is where it is right now. The angle formed by that ray and the surface of the earth changes, but that change is inconsequential to gravity, since just as parts of Earth are turning away from the Sun, other parts are turning toward the Sun.
Let us imagine the Earth so far away it takes 12 hours for sunlight to reach Earth. Shall I assume therefore that where the sun “seems” to be is actually on the wrong side of Earth, away from the sun? Are the outer planets illuminated on their “dark sides”? That would be absurd!
Since all of the planets are illuminated by the sun on the sunny side, the apparent position of the sun must necessarily also be the actual position of the sun because the vectors of the photons must point directly back to their source, and it is not moving! So if it takes 12 hours for the photons to get to the outer planets, that’s okay because the sun is exactly where it was when it emitted them 12 hours earlier.
To think otherwise must necessarily invoke an “ether” that is fixed in space, defines the meaning of “fixed” and everything travels through it. If that is your belief, well, there’s probably no harm in it.
Michael 2, I had never before heard of libertariannews.com, prior to your comment below.
I appreciate the link to the article on proof the earth is moving through space, I enjoyed that article very much.
Your libertarian link did quote the late Dr. Tom Van Flandern, whom I have read. Van Flandern argues for gravity as a force acting at tremendous speed – much faster than the speed of light. He also argues against gravity arising from the curvature of space. Placing a ball on a slope, even a slippery slope, in no way implies the ball will roll down that slope. In fact, objects at rest tend to stay at rest, so a ball placed on a slope, even a steep and slippery slope, ought to stay where it is put. Yet, something causes the ball to roll down the slope. That cause is gravity. Therefore, gravity is not the slope. Gravity is other than / more than the curvature of space.
Gravitational waves are relevant to the climate science problem but the connection is with the early gravitational wave research done 50 years ago. At that time, Joe Weber published a number of articles showing the detection of gravitational waves. Those observations were not replicated by others and eventually discredited. A good book on this is “Gravity’s Shadow” by Harry Collins.
The mistakes that Weber made (in the new field of gravitational wave astronomy) were quite similar to the mistakes made more recently in the new field of climate science. The first was an abuse of statistics. Weber tuned his analysis until he achieved a “discovery”. This is similar to the climate science practice of tuning models to match climate history. Achieving a match this way proves nothing. Eventually climate science will realize this and will quit making this mistake. That moment will be delayed, as it was in Weber’s case, by the desire to avoid unpleasant admissions of error. With the LIGO experiment, the tuning is done on “playground data”, that is, it is done on data that is not used as part of the announcement of a result.
A second mistake by Weber was a failure to use “double blind” analysis. This concept came from medicine. One doesn’t let the experimenters know whether or not the data they’re working on is fake or real. LIGO does this by arranging for fake black hole data to be secretly fed into the apparatus with only a few people (of the thousand or so) aware of it. The other scientists can’t know if the data is fake or not so they treat it as if it were real. Just before the publication of data, a “box” is opened and the team finds out whether they were on a practice run or a real discovery. If it’s faked, then they have to rewrite the papers and instead of announcing a discovery, they announce a successful (one hopes) fake discovery. And if the team misses the fake data? That would show that they have a problem with the analysis.
The LIGO experiment was desigend with full knowledge of the historic failures of gravitational wave detection. For this reason, it has been very carefully designed to avoid these pitfalls. I personally have no doubt that a signal was detected and that the signal came from some sort of “black hole” merger. That is, the merger of high gravitation objects whether they’re black holes or not. To see if the waves emitted match general relativity predictions accurately will require the detection of thousands of more such mergers. And with the construction of more gravitational wave observatories, and with the steady improvement in their sensitivity, I’ve no doubt at all that these detections will arrive in the next few years.
It wasn’t just gravitational wave science that experienced these sorts of failures. They were also found in elementary particle physics. An effect that is very strong in climate science today is that scientists tend to publish “results that confirm previous studies” more than they publish “results that disconfirm previous studies”. So if the first measurement of the attribute of an elementary particle is far from correct, the follow-up studies will not ignore this result. Instead they will tend to be closer to it than to the correct result. And it is only after a series of measurements that truth is approached. Part of the effect is due to experimenters knowing that their results are different from expected and looking around for “corrections” to improve their results. One avoids this by double blinding the experiment. This problem has happened enough times in elementary particle experimental results that the official particle data group “PDG” keeps a set of the graphs on its website. These are a warning, “use double blinding when doing science, etc”:
http://pdg.lbl.gov/2015/reviews/rpp2014-rev-history-plots.pdf
Climate science will eventually recognize its failings in bad statistics, model manipulation without double blinding, etc., and will also become a real science.
Thanks, Carl, for this comment. If I have understood all this, the gravitational waves should have a specific signature. Black holes or other massive bodies may merge but they cannot de-merge. If the signal would show a decreasing amplitude and frequency, would that be explained away as a false positive caused by earth quakes, passing trains or fakery? Would alternative explanations be tried with equal force for wanted and unwanted signals? Are you sure that in the double-blind experiment the success signal of the black hole merger was presented in mirror image to some physicists? If so, was that mirror signal rejected because of its signature? In a real double-blind experiment a random number generator should present fifty percent of all signals in mirror image. We may tell that to the physicists. Double blind means that neither I nor the physicists know the key, kept secret in a safe. Anyhow, the LIGO data may contain a straightforward falsification of the whole idea. In the years to come not one real signal should have the wrong signature. Very exciting.
Carl, very interesting and informative post. However, are you aware of any instance where an error, such as the Weber mistake, has withstood massive investigation and input of research effort? Many cases I can think of the error was an assumption that become recieved wisdom, but based on very little evidence. When the assumption was scrutinised, evidence rapidly overwhelmed the prior error. Examples are H. pylori and plate tectonics. Others are errors that propagated for a time because of publication bias for positive results – such as cold fusion.
In the case of climate, there was if anything an assumption that man could not affedct the climate. It was only when a significant research effort was directed at this that AGW was taken seriously. SInce then, a massive amount oif research has failed to overturn what has become the accepted theory. There are no similar examples from history that I am aware of.
..LOL, you are delusional ! You have it completely backwards !
“Carl, very interesting and informative post. However, are you aware of any instance where an error, such as the Weber mistake, has withstood massive investigation and input of research effort?” Yes, the examples from particle physics are examples of this. Climate science is a little special because of the incredible amount of politics that is going into it. It is also special in that it is extremely difficult to obtain data. That is, we have “good” climate data only for the last few decades but we’re trying to understand a system that oscillates on every time scale from hourly out to 100,000 years. So climate science needs far more than “massive investigation” to be fixed. It needs superhuman investigation, that is, it’s not possible to fix.
“Many cases I can think of the error was an assumption that become recieved wisdom, but based on very little evidence. When the assumption was scrutinised, evidence rapidly overwhelmed the prior error. Examples are H. pylori and plate tectonics. Others are errors that propagated for a time because of publication bias for positive results – such as cold fusion.” There are a long series of errors in diet research, especially having to do with oils. Right now we’re experiencing a ridiculous “anti-gluten” fad. For 20 years scientists were telling us about a “beepocalypse” because almost everything we eat is supposedly pollinated only by bees (LOL). This was conveniently blamed on things that were politically motivated such as pesticides; but it turned out that it was diseaes that were spreading faster due to our modern habit of moving bees around. Similar stuff is being bandied about regarding GMOs.
(1) As a general rule, it’s going to be a lot faster to disprove a common false belief when it’s easy to disprove the belief. The problem with climate science is that it is extremely difficult to disprove (or prove). As Thomas Kuhn famously said, humans never move from belief in something to a position of belief in nothing. Instead, paradigms are always replaced only by another paradigm. This means that until we actually understand what causes climate to change we will continue to assume that it’s CO2 and any anomalies will be ignored. “the failure of a result to conform to the paradigm is seen not as refuting the paradigm, but as the mistake of the researcher”. (2) The “warmistas” already are the majority in climate science. This just hasn’t yet filtered through to the mass media.
What Happens When Black Holes Collide? – Kip Thorne
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42cqhjmt4vs
Very illuminating, thank-you
Why is one Black Hole spinning clockwise and the other is spinning counterclockwise ?? ( red / blue )
Science fiction
I am absolutely flabbergasted by the constant misunderstanding of the difference between gravitational waves and gravity waves and the flippant interchangeable use of those terms . I did not know but searched to find out.
http://news.discovery.com/space/gravitational-waves-vs-gravity-waves-know-the-difference-160208.htm
If this in not correct, please reply with what is the correct explanation.
Blind Injection Test
http://www.nature.com/news/has-giant-ligo-experiment-seen-gravitational-waves-1.18449
“The original blind-injection exercises took 18 months and 6 months respectively. The first one was discarded, but in the second case, the collaboration wrote a paper and held a vote to decide whether they would make an announcement. Only then did the blind-injection team ‘open the envelope’ and reveal that the events had been staged.”
Since then $200 millions were spent on upgrading the detectors. The pressure on the team to detect something was mounting.
The blind injection test worked great. The whole team got fooled. They wrote a paper. Perhaps all what we are seeing is another blind injection test. But this time w/o the envelope revealing that the events were staged.
Climate Change will make gravitational waves more frequent and more destructive.
Back again
After reading the article and a bit of the images shifting and flipping I reproduced the Ligo’s combined image.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LIGO-2.gif
However
LIGO paper : On September 14, 2015 at 09:50:45 UTC the two detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave. Observatory simultaneously observed a transient gravitational-wave signal.
Wikipedia: On September 18, 2015, Advanced LIGO began its first formal science observations at about four times the sensitivity of the initial LIGO interferometers.[10] Its sensitivity will be further enhanced until it reaches design sensitivity around 2021
I would like to know what is going on here. Lets assume wiki got their date wrong, but even so how it is likely that they got hit so early in their observations.
Is this a ‘beginners luck’ or black holes are merging every other day of the week, or is it something more to it?
IS LIGO PAPER Freud
LIGO WEBSITE:
LIGO’s first science run with the advanced LIGO instruments will commence on September 14, 2015. For more information on that, read “The countdown to first observations has begun”.
https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/aligo-dedication.
Wikipedia:
On September 18, 2015, Advanced LIGO began its first formal science observations at about four times the sensitivity of the initial LIGO interferometers.[10] Its sensitivity will be further enhanced until it reaches design sensitivity around 2021
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGO
LIGO PAPER :
On September 14, 2015 at 09:50:45 UTC the two detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave. Observatory simultaneously observed a transient gravitational-wave signal.
http://www.leif.org/research/Grav-Waves-Detected.pdf
Dr. Svalgaard WHERE ARE YOU?
We need answers.
No need to invent conspiracy theories here. The paper explains what went on. No mystery, nothing suspicious. No need to try to disparage their discovery.
I agree
LIGO: Planning for a bright tomorrow
The Advanced LIGO detectors officially began their first observing run, which is called O1, on 18 September 2015. The detectors are not yet at final sensitivity,
http://www.ligo.org/science/Publication-ObservingScenario/index.php
NATURE : The week in science: 18–24 September 2015
LIGO is ‘go’ Advanced LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) officially began gathering data on 18 September. LIGO’s twin instruments, in Louisiana and Washington state, each have two 4-kilometre arms, and represent a US$200-million overhaul of the initial LIGO,
http://www.nature.com/news/the-week-in-science-18-24-september-2015-1.18402
BBC: 19 September 2015 Science & Environment
Labs in the US states of Washington and Louisiana began “listening” on Friday (Friday was 18 September) for the gravitational waves that are predicted to flow through the Earth when violent events occur in space.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34298363
AND MANY MORE QUOTES THAT LIGO STARTED WORK ON 18TH SEPTEMBER 2015
(paper claims discovery made on September 14th 09:50:45 UTC
No need to be so thick. It is amazing how some people will try anything to sow doubt.
So there was some distortion between end point on a 4 km star.
The length of the arms is 4 km so the light makes the round trip in about 27 microseconds. However the highest frequency of the detected wave was 250 hz, making the shortest period 4 milliseconds. So the length of the arms is changing more than a factor of a hundred times more slowly than the light is measuring that length.
How fixed are these end-points or could the ground be shaken enough by earthquakes have caused the change .
EMSC Sichuan-yunnan Border Reg, China Sep 14 09:45 4.7 40
http://earthquake-report.com/2015/09/14/earthquakes-in-the-world-on-september-14-2015-m2-9-or-more/
Lets assume wiki got their date wrong, but even so how it is likely that they got hit so early in their observations.
The dates are correct. The formal start of the observations was 18 Sept, but final testing started earlier, so there are data from earlier. The paper [read it, instead of trying to throw mud on the discovery] says clearly that they analyzed 16 days of data from Sept. 12 to Oct. 20, so one event in 16 days. So, if that is the frequency of occurrence, we can expect [as there in fact are] many more events. Nothing unusual is going on. The occurrence rate is now a measured quantity
“The Advanced LIGO detectors officially began their first observing run, which is called O1, on 18 September 2015. The detectors are not yet at final sensitivity”
paper should state that it was a test run at low sensitivity, and noting was found since.
from Peter comment above: “The blind injection test worked great. The whole team got fooled. They wrote a paper. Perhaps all what we are seeing is another blind injection test. But this time w/o the envelope revealing that the events were staged.”
It looks as they found nothing.
It looks like you don’t know what you are talking about, as usual.
It was strong !
Everybody thought it was fluke
listen at 3.30 min in
https://youtu.be/wrqbfT8qcBc
It must have been if gravitational wave was recorded on September 14 at 9.50 UTC
but LIGO become operational 4 days latter on 18 September 18.
Mind boggles what is going on at the LIGO, if they did let us down, I’m done with science, moving to the pseudo-science, far more reliable. /sarc
…” It was strong !
Everybody thought it was fluke
listen at 3.30 min in ”
Not there….? Wrong video ?
Now that we have some experimental idea on the scale of the phenomenon, what can be done to tune the instrument:
– add more axis’
– vibrate the mirrors at a known freq. to dampen out local noise
not to rank myself on the crackpot scale – but would this experiment work better on the geologically stable Moon? (Always looking for reasons to go back.)
“but would this experiment work better on the geologically stable Moon?”
I like that, strain gage the moon! Temp change might be troubling?
Do gravity waves reflect?
@ur momisugly Paul:
Gravitational waves (not gravity waves, those are VERY different) do not reflect, nor are they hidden or attenuated by intervening vacuum, matter or energy in their propagation.
This is part of the reason a fair number of astronomers & cosmologists are keen to see this technology work: if an event producing measurable/detectable gravitational waves happens within our “time cone,” we’ll (theoretically, possibly, etc.) be able to see it, no matter what might be in the way — distance, dust, event horizons, you name it.
Why not in place in orbit ??
@jeanparisot (& Paul, Marcus):
If I understand correctly, there will soon (1-2 years) be another pair of detection devices online which will give us the minimum 4 points of reference, which allow for (more) precise location of the source of these events in 3D space.
Local noise is already a non-issue, as any signals not received at both detectors is automatically discarded.
As to operating in space or on the Moon, etc., the LISA project was going to pursue the investigation of gravitational waves in an orbital environment, which (as you surmise, Marcus) would have removed seismic, atmospheric and acoustic interference from the picture. This would have inherently negated the need for the mechanical & computational gyrations in which LIGO must engage in order to cancel out those effects. (That is not be read as a statement in doubt of LIGO, only that LISA would have avoided those problems by design, as well as being significantly more sensitive from the start.)
If you’re close to one of these black hole collisions, say within 10-100 lightyears, would the strength of the emitted gravitational waves be strong enough to, for instance, disrupt or pull apart stars and planets? Would it be like taking a spin inside an “Einsteinian washing machine”? Could it shatter rock into sand?
No, you need to be much closer and then the effect would be from tidal forces rather than grav. waves.
@belousov:
At a certain point, yes, the stretching & compression of space-time would become noticeable even to one’s senses. However, as lsvalgaard points out, the tidal effects produced directly by the objects/events in question would render the GW effects… shall we say, moot.
In a sense, it’s like being worried about a lethal dose of neutrinos coming from a supernova; such a thing does exist, but you won’t be around to see it thanks to all of the OTHER violence being perpetrated at the time!
lsvalgaard, Smoky
Thanks.
Another question: from rumours keaking out I’m guessing that these signals are being already detected quite frequently. So such mass catastrophe events may be reasonably common across the universe.
(That’s yet another one of the awesome and beautiful things about LIGO astronomy – you don’t have to scan and search the sky for your signal; with LIGO the sky cones to you.)
So if gravitational waves criss-cross the universe from multiple sources, how long will it be before the earth arrives at a part of space-time where two (or more) gravitational wavetrains meet. Can we expect phenomena such as interference, constructive and destructive. Interference fringes? This will open a new field of gravitational space-time “optics”.
Finally: there is also talk of new LIGO devices. Would it not be ideal for a hanfdul of such devices to be distributed around the globe? The LIGO L-shapes need to be oriented to include all the 3d stereoangles. Rather than digging a huge expensive hole vertically down, LIGOs should be located aroung the globe, on all the continents and ideally not excluding the Pacific ocean (Tahiti, Kiribati/Christmas Island, Marshall Islands e.g. Arno Atoll ?)
A most interesting thread and, in contrast to those who feel that it has laid bare how ignorant skeptics at WUWT are for being skeptical of the gravitational wave detection, I would like to point out that many, even the great lsvalgaard, have not made a distinction between the truly ignorant contrarianism (that in CAGW discussions gets deliberately lumped into skepticism by the faithful) and thoughtful, legitimate, skepticism that has been tempered by blatant scientific dishonesty and carelessness across a broad range of scientific disciplines over the past few decades.
One must consider two levels of legitimate skepticism of scientific discoveries. One level can be that among thoughtful individuals who are not experts directly in the field. Frequency of fraudulent papers in medicine, for example should cause this group of skeptics to be skeptical at least of extraordinary research claims in this field.
“members of the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics, was to assess the characteristics of fraud in medical research. The survey was performed between April and July 1998. The participation rate was only 37%. We report the results because a majority (51%) of the participants knew about fraudulent projects, and many did not know whether the organization they work for has a formal system for handling suspected fraud or not.”
This part of the quote will resonate with CAGW research skeptics:
“Different forms of fraud (e.g., fabrication and falsification of data, deceptive reporting of results, suppression of data, and deceptive design or analysis) had been observed in fairly similar numbers. We conclude that fraud is not a negligible phenomenon in medical research, and that increased awareness of the forms in which it is expressed seems appropriate.”
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0197245600000696
“Piltdown Man” was a hoax in anthropology/paleontology lasting over 40 years and wasting resources and endeavors in the field. It was believed by the scientific community although there were many skeptics in the 5 years after its ‘discovery’. A geologist (Edmond) in the 1930s claimed the strata it was found in didn’t make sense and finally fluorine contents measured in 1953 showed parts of the skull to be modern – Edmonds, who had been ignored, reappears to put his end to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man
Now, you can see that Edmonds was the odd man out so he would have been considered an “an illiterate ignoramus” by many of the attackers here, likely including lsvalgaard. It could have been argued that erosion had displaced the skeleton from its proper stratat. We live in an age of moral turpitude (do you doubt that) and it is prudent and intelligent for the default position to be skeptical at first site.
Yes, they got the signal at two different places. Assuming(!) everything is above board and this tiny signal can’t be from a more mundane source, (I would check seismographic activity and whatever around the world, etc.) it may indeed be as claimed. Yes, there are those who are simply psychological contrarians and they pollute every site. But some very respectable skeptics have been impugned here on this thread.
this tiny signal can’t be from a more mundane source, (I would check seismographic activity and whatever around the world, etc.)
The experimenters check that very carefully. About 200,000 ‘channels’ of noise [sensors around the site, worldwide seismic and other activity, etc] are monitored in real time and data that are clearly contaminated are eliminated.
One reason for the delay in reporting the detection was to make sure the signal wasn´t spurious or caused by some terrestrial event. The apparatus(es) were designed and improved to minimize, then eliminate such false signals.
Russell
February 16, 2016 at 8:24 am
Science is not about consensus. It’s about disproof, disbelief and skepticism. It’s not about consensus.
Gary Pearse says:
“This part of the quote will resonate with CAGW research skeptics:”
Different forms of fraud (e.g., fabrication and falsification of data, deceptive reporting of results, suppression of data, and deceptive design or analysis) had been observed in fairly similar numbers. We conclude that fraud is not a negligible phenomenon in medical research, and that increased awareness of the forms in which it is expressed seems appropriate.
No kidding. If there’s that much fraud in medical research, it’s probably doubled and squared in climate ‘science’. With the federal government alone pouring more than a billion dollars a year into climate grants, the temptation to spin the numbers becomes irresistible.
That’s also because the universities that employ many of the same scientists are putting huge pressure on them to generate grants. And of course, we see almost daily how government agencies themselves put pressure on their bureaucrat employees to show rapid global warming when there is none.
The corruption begins at the top. Big money is destroying honest science.
..President Cruz will put a stop to it on his first day !
Here’s hoping that in a couple generations, maybe less, we will have gravitational telescopy that would make LIGO seem quaint and crude.
That would be awesome, but then, so would a functioning Human colony on Mars…..
“a functioning Human colony” is almost an oxymoron these days,
There are no liberals on Mars !!
Just remember, Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids.
Yea, but Elton was a liberal..umm non male, so he couldn’t raise kids anywhere !
Bottom line here is they interpret their findings as positive.
BICEP2 data and a paper that followed has already been retracted.
It’s like the Quartz gyroscope experiment all over again. The actual data does not pertain to black holes and gravity waves but interpreted findings.
With the Gyroscope experiment, the actual experiment failed, utterly. There was too much interference, which was not foreseen. So the guys played with the data, for 5 years, and subtracted and massaged data for those 5 years to provide a positive result. That’s ambiguous science at best.
Like AGW, if you are not a relativist in astrophysics, you are a denier 😀
If you don’t look at the data through the filter of relativity, different interpretations are possible. If you already are convinced of something (a something Einstein himself did not conclude possible) then you will only interpret the data one way.
I am so tired of the omission of inconvenient truths. Like the Hydrogen gas I mentioned passing the alleged SMBH, how did the relativists explain why the hydrogen was not consumed?
Well they hit the maths again and cooked up a binary star pair in the gas cloud, one they could not detect but.. because relativity is how they see the universe, then that was the only answer they had. Again they turned mathematics into something physical, relativists have a habit of turning purely mathematical constructs into physical entities, dark matter, dark energy, black holes, big bang, singularities.
Add to that the list of things that completely defy theories, just get shelved. Like stars forming with 20% of the mass. Stars forming along strings of plasma, stars with so much helium that they cannot form according to theory, the distinct lack of light distortion in space. Completely different red shift objects next to each other, connected, NASA tried to debunk this with a photo, but when you turned the photo negative you could see the connection between quasars. That was outright dishonest by NASA.
Theoretical astrophysics and astrophysics, in many parts are a long running joke.
The best though is the way the relativists jump from Newton to Einstein seamlessly without it seems ever noticing, when trying to explain relativity.
Gravity without mass. That is what gravitational waves suggest, Einstein would be laughing at such a suggestion
..” Gravitational Wave ” , not a gravity wave !
Marcus
Congratulations!
Your stubborn refusal to face and acknowledge the clear facts of this case, indulging instead in frivolous paranoic nay-saying for its own sake, has probably caused a number of people to think again about the real nature and value of “scientific skepticism” at this website.
Because of you, a number of people will probably reassess their opposition to the political consensus of CAGW.
You may also achieve a few percentage point decrease in traffic to WUWT because of this.
Not a bad day’s work, mate!
Even phlogiston was a successful theory…for a time.
The relativists have invested their lives and careers in a massive work of mathematical deduction. Of beautiful theories, it is the fairest of the fair. And what hath Feynman to say of beautiful theories…?
@ur momisugly Michael J. Dunn
“The relativists have invested their lives and careers in a massive work of mathematical deduction. Of beautiful theories, it is the fairest of the fair. And what hath Feynman to say of beautiful theories…?”
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” – Richard P. Feynman
Fortunately, relativity agrees beautifully with observation and observations with its predictions. It is therefore rightly regarded as one of the most successful theories ever in science.
I don’t know if anyone will stop back. Perhaps this will clear up the confusion over the press release on September 18 2015 and Ligo recording the event on September 14.
They called for help on the night of September 15
http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/info/press-releases/LIGO-panstarrs/
everyone was keeping things under wraps.
michael
They measured LIGO’s instrumental errors and read into it all the conclusions they’ve ever wanted.
It’s proper to be skeptical, but this experiment and the results are quite well grounded. Just dissing it offhandedly isn’t skeptical, it’s just dumb. And there are several other earlier results that, thru further analysis, may be weaker events but still valid occurrences of the waves.
OK, here’s what is likely just the first analysis of what LIGO may have measured, and to this layman it appears Wal Thornhill’s presentations of alternative explanations are fully as credible, if not more, than the posited ‘detection of gravitational waves’ that all must believe, for fear of being lumped in with The Willfully Ignorant and Illiterate Crowd.
Thornhill also brings forward some basic history, including Albert Einstein’s own view of his mathematical work looking back over his career and thought…as well as some central questions that to my ear require cogent address – not meaningless ‘hand waving’ (or gravitational waving, if you prefer).
Crap.
Agree completely. It is amazing how people can be taken in by such nonsense.