LIGO gravitational wave announcement

[jonesdave116]

So far:

The signal was detected on September 14, 2015.

It was “exactly” what Einstein’s theory predicted for two colliding black holes.

The two black holes are indeed about 30 solar masses. They are about 1.3 billion light years away.

This detection is proof that binary black hole systems can exist. Each black hole was about 150km in diameter. Each contained 30 solar masses and was accelerated at about half the speed of light. That is what collided. “It’s mindboggling,” says Reitze.

Being 1.3 billion light years away means that these black holes collided 1.3 billion years ago. The gravitational waves have been travelling through space for 1.3 billion years. When they arrived at Earth on 12 Sept. 2015, they caused the LIGO machinery to move by 1/1000 of the width of a proton particle. LIGO detected it. Amazing.

We are going to see things that we never knew existed, predicts Reitze, who goes on to call LIGO a ‘scientific moonshot’, likening it to the Apollo moon landings of the 1960s.

https://www.theguardian.com/science...latest-physics-einstein-ligo-black-holes-live

 

[macdoc]

Positively brilliant. And they had never seen such an event before ....luck favours the prepared mind....in this case the prepared science community.



The two detectors...Perhaps as significant as the CBR....maybe more.

 

[ohms]

News post is up but the website is struggling a little atm:

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20160211

 

[jonesdave116]

Bit more:

The tell-tale signal can be seen by just by eye rising above the noise of the detector. It was detected first in the LIGO Livingston detector. The clincher was that 7 milliseconds later the same signal was seen in the Hanford LIGO detector. The time delay was produced by the gravitational waves travelling in a particular direction

The signals correspond very well indeed to a theoretical model produced by Einstein’s relativity. There is little to no ambiguity in this detection.

The signal came from the Southern sky, in the rough direction of the Magellanic clouds, the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. At 1.3 billion light years away, however, it is very far beyond the Magellanic clouds, deep in intergalactic space somewhere.

“This is the first of many to come,” says González. We can now listen to the Universe.

https://www.theguardian.com/science...latest-physics-einstein-ligo-black-holes-live

 

[JeanTate]

I think the most staggering part is this (source is that in ohms post):

About 3 times the mass of the sun was converted into gravitational waves in a fraction of a second—with a peak power output about 50 times that of the whole visible universe.

 

[jonesdave116]

BREAKING NEWS:

"Minor earth tremor in Australia attributed to Stephen Crothers repeately banging head against wall, before removing said head with double-barrelled shotgun. More to follow."

Sorry, I might have made that up.

 

[MikeG]

The BBC version.

And from it:

"Gravitational waves go through everything. They are hardly affected by what they pass through, and that means that they are perfect messengers," said Prof Bernard Schutz, from Cardiff University, UK.
"The information carried on the gravitational wave is exactly the same as when the system sent it out; and that is unusual in astronomy. We can't see light from whole regions of our own galaxy because of the dust that is in the way, and we can't see the early part of the Big Bang because the Universe was opaque to light earlier than a certain time.
"With gravitational waves, we do expect eventually to see the Big Bang itself," he told the BBC.

 

[jonesdave116]

If you want to listen to the sound of 2 BHs colliding, then follow the link below:
https://www.theguardian.com/science...latest-physics-einstein-ligo-black-holes-live

 

[thedopefishlives]

BREAKING NEWS:

"Minor earth tremor in Australia attributed to Stephen Crothers repeately banging head against wall, before removing said head with double-barrelled shotgun. More to follow."

Sorry, I might have made that up.

Actually, I imagine he is probably in a bar somewhere (or will be soon), searching for a way to spin this to make him look smokingly good and criticize the mainstream yet again. It's not often that hucksters admit they're wrong, after all.

 

[jonesdave116]

Ahh, damn. It's all a fake or cover up to get more funding! Knew there was something fishy.

http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16117

 

[MikeG]

I presume people all over the world are already planning "Super-LIGO"?

 

[jonesdave116]

I presume people all over the world are already planning "Super-LIGO"?

According to Kip Thorne:

Thorne says that we expect to see more signals from similar sources within the next year. Tweeks and improvements will advance LIGO’s sensitivity by about three times. He promises, “A huge richness of gravitational wave signals in LIGO.”

 

[jonesdave116]

Hmmm, according to the Guardian blog/ tweety thing:

The final question of the webcast press conference is whether LIGO has seen other signals. Gonzalez answers very carefully placing the emphasis back on the signal announced today. As she finishes one of her fellow panellists quips ‘that didn’t even sound rehearsed’.

Hmmm. What should we make of that?

According to New Scientist, who have done some sleuthing in publicly available observatory logs, LIGO may be investigating another two signals, detected in December 2015.

Let’s wait and see.

 

[MikeG]

Stephen Hawking on the discovery.

 

[SusanB-M1]

I think the news is most exciting. I'm so very glad it has happened while I'm alive! I'll be watching and listening for
many years I hope.

 

[jonesdave116]

Paper available here: http://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102

Up sum from the Guardian:

On 14 September 2015 at 9:50 GMT, the two detectors of the newly upgraded Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected a signal.

It was unambiguously a gravitational wave signal because it matched the predictions from Einstein’s general theory of relativity almost precisely.

A gravitational wave is a ripple in the invisible fabric of the universe, called the spacetime continuum. The particular ripple moved the LIGO detectors by about one thousandth the width of a proton (the tiny particle found at the heart of a hydrogen atom).

It was generated by two black holes that collided 1.3 billion light years away. The masses of the individual black holes were large, at around 36 and 29 times the mass of the Sun each. They were just 150km across each, and collided at half the speed of light.

The merger formed a single black hole of 62 solar masses. The missing three solar masses of matter were transformed into the energy that powered the gravitational waves detected by LIGO.

This transforms the way in which we can observe the Universe, and is expected to lead to the discovery of unanticipated celestial objects.

https://www.theguardian.com/science...latest-physics-einstein-ligo-black-holes-live

 

[jonesdave116]

A fitting summary of various pseudosciences right now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRJby3PCfbo

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

This could be useful in detecting supernovae before the light reaches us. Light has to pass through the interstellar/intergalactic media and so travels very slightly under the speed of light in an absolute vacuum. As far as we know, nothing impedes the progress of gravity waves.

If nothing impedes the progress, how is it detected? How does it affect mass? Are they detecting the ether moving?

I'm trying to imagine something that affects mass but is not affected by mass.

 

[macdoc]

Space is warped and the interferometer picks up the "bend" as the wave passed...You need to look at the youtube videos.
I think you need some catch up on your gravity/space/time/mass and energy concepts.

Here is a good pre-discovery article
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2010/08/25/what-is-the-speed-of-gravity/

It's related to gravitational lensing

Quintuple quasar gravitational lens. Image credit: Hubble

he background quasar is the brilliant core of a galaxy. It is powered by a black hole, which is devouring gas and dust and creating a gusher of light in the process. When the quasar’s light passes through the gravity field of the galaxy cluster that lies between us and the quasar, the light is bent by the space-warping gravity field in such a way that five separate images of the object are produced surrounding the cluster’s center. The fifth quasar image is embedded to the right of the core of the central galaxy in the cluster. The cluster also creates a cobweb of images of other distant galaxies gravitationally lensed into arcs.

http://www.universetoday.com/8200/hubbles-best-gravitational-lens/

Space is bent by the mass of the galaxy in front of the quasar so the light "curves".

In this case....the "ripples" from the gravitational collapse move out like the ripples on a pond...it was predicted but up until now we had no way to detect them..huge scientific breakthrough. On a scale with the discovery of the residual background radiation from the big bang.

If the earth suddenly disappeared with a pop....it would produce a gravity wave.

That's what happened here on a much larger scale.....an enormous amount of mass was converted into energy in a tiny fraction of a second....energy equivalent to 50 times the output of all the stars in the universe.....that's the scale of this event.

That caused the gravity wave.

The back story ....cool read
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/here-s-first-person-spot-those-gravitational-waves

 

[Cl1mh4224rd]

If nothing impedes the progress, how is it detected? How does it affect mass? Are they detecting the ether moving?

I'm trying to imagine something that affects mass but is not affected by mass.

By using light.

A more sensitive class of detector uses laser interferometry to measure gravitational-wave induced motion between separated 'free' masses. [...] Each observatory has two light storage arms that are 4 kilometers in length. These are at 90 degree angles to each other, with the light passing through 1 m diameter vacuum tubes running the entire 4 kilometers. A passing gravitational wave will slightly stretch one arm as it shortens the other.

Even with such long arms, the strongest gravitational waves will only change the distance between the ends of the arms by at most roughly 10⁻¹⁸ meters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave#Ground-based_interferometers

ETA: This might be better: How does LIGO look for gravitational waves?.

Each detector looks like a giant “L” stamped on the landscape – two four-kilometre arms at right angles to one another.

Inside each arm is a tunnel carrying a laser beam.

The laser bounces up and down each arm of the detector before recombining at a detector.

Any expansion of one of the arms relative to the other will shift a mirror slightly, changing the pattern revealed on the detector.