fishbob
Seasonally Disaffected
Simple: All you need is 78 gazilldillion tons of rapidly spinning mass and a way to keep it from sucking in the entire solar system.
LIGO gravitational wave announcement
- Thread starter Pixel42
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Simple: All you need is 78 gazilldillion tons of rapidly spinning mass and a way to keep it from sucking in the entire solar system.
Gravitational waves affect mass; they apply little accelerations that make things fall in different directions. LIGO had some big, massive mirrors that were hanging vertically, but the gravity wave made them "fall" horizontally (back and forth a few times) by a few attometers each way; I guess they must have gotten up to speeds of femtometers per second.
Yes, those mirror motions did affect the gravitational waves a little bit---it's not quite right to say "nothing" impedes the progress of a gravity wave. But gravity waves are, by some absurd number of orders of magnitude, better at passing through matter than anything else in the Universe. Better than photons, better than neutrinos, probably better than dark matter.
p0lka
Illuminator
this gives us another way to detect the universe then yeah?
We use the electromagnetic spectrum atm, but this makes us like an insect on the surface of water that now has the ability to detect the water vibration itself, rather than waiting for the light to get to us?
We use the electromagnetic spectrum atm, but this makes us like an insect on the surface of water that now has the ability to detect the water vibration itself, rather than waiting for the light to get to us?
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So we can now detect extreme events, determine where it happened (and hence when) , and also the scale of it. Hopefully the pending improvements will allow more (and smaller) events to be detected. But will this allow us to eventually map the local universe in the way that we can with radio waves? The detectors involved are huge and expensive.
Where do those brighter than me see this technology going?
Where do those brighter than me see this technology going?
rjh01
Gentleman of leisure
Is this the first thing that has been detected that has the same speed as light yet is not part of the electromagnetic spectrum? I know certain particles travel at ALMOST the speed of light. But these do not count.
Proving the incompetents who think they have theories better than Einstein when they have no functional physics or math background to justify their "theories" and nutcake mutterings wrong again is definitely one!!!
BenBurch
Gatekeeper of The Left
This is damn cool.
MaartenVergu
Illuminator
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The Garduan said:
That's all? Just that? That's enough 'signal' to interprete this as 'huge evidence' and 'a ripple in spacetime'?
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Which is why they are also so much harder to detect.
A girl sends a letter to her lover: "I don't love you anymore, I've found someone else.", and on reading it he is heartbroken.
A different girl sends a letter to her lover, but this time she has it printed on microfilm. At first he sees only a few spots on the film, and feels nothing, but as he later magnifies the image, it reads, "I don't love you anymore, I've found someone else."
Is this lover any less heartbroken?
Yes, because this particular type of tiny motion could only have been caused by a ripple in spacetime.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
Cl1mh4224rd
Philosopher
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Technically we are not *sure* whether all of the are massive. (We know at least two of the three neutrino masses are nonzero, but the third could be zero. It'd be weird.)
Otherwise, yes, only photons and gravitons travel at c.
Cl1mh4224rd
Philosopher
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Source (which is linked in that Imgur album, but also includes a video): http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1853
MaartenVergu
Illuminator
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How do you know that for sure? Maybe there are other, unexplained phenomena outhere wich are no gravitational waves. How do you know for sure that it is not something else yet unknown? It is just an interpretation (confirmation bias) to interprete this 'signal' as evidence for your theory, because you are so focused on it, to find it. Maybe it is something we don't know yet. Why jumping to conclusions that 'it can only be a gravitational wave'.
The claim of the existence of gravitational waves is an extra-ordinary claim. You need exta-ordinary evidence.
You need a lot more then one 'move' of one thousandth the width of a proton to convince the public.
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Cl1mh4224rd
Philosopher
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Perhaps. But this observation matches predictions of gravitational waves so well that there's currently no reason to suspect "something else".
Dark matter doesn't work like that.
Neutrinos don't work like that. A single neutrino isn't going to separately alter the lengths of two 4km-long tunnels. Also, the waves were detected at both LIGO observatories, which are, I think, roughly 2,000 miles apart.
If you're interested, why not try reading up on the topic?
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smartcooky
Penultimate Amazing
IMO, this discovery must come close to turning the "Theory of Relativity" into the "Fact of Relativity"... it is that important!
It also means that the people designing the detectors must now know they are on the right track... refinements in the future will likely lead to the discovery of gravitational waves from less massive gravitational events.
It also means that the people designing the detectors must now know they are on the right track... refinements in the future will likely lead to the discovery of gravitational waves from less massive gravitational events.
He doesn't. Neither does anyone else.
That's science.
How do you know for sure that there's a massive ball of plasma, ~150 million km from us, radiating light, IR, ...? You - Maartenn100 - don't. Not for sure.
Yep.
Could be invisible pink fairies too. Cavorting with invisible blue unicorns.
Maartenn100, do you *do* science?
Consistent. With a well-established, well-studied theory. Quantitatively. Objectively.
It's called science.
Huh?
The (US, Italian, German, Australian, ...) taxpayers are already convinced.