Gravitational Wave Discovery Opens 'New Window On The Universe' - HuffPo

[WillyT]

Gravitational Wave Discovery Opens 'New Window On The Universe'
Confirmation that the mysterious waves have been discovered ushers in a new era of astronomy and may answer big questions about black holes.
David Freeman & Jacqueline Howard
02/10/2016 01:15 pm ET | Updated 4 minutes ago

<snip>

Albert Einstein was right! He hypothesized a century ago that gravitational waves exist, and rumors have been swirling for months that scientists have detected them. Those rumors were confirmed in a press conference (above) on Thursday.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves," Dr. David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), said during the conference. "We did it."

His announcement was followed a round of applause by scientists and journalists gathered at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., for the "status report" from researchers involved in the long quest to detect the waves.

Gravitational waves have been likened to ripples in space-time that flow outward at the speed of light when black holes or other massive celestial objects collide.

Reitze said that the detected waves were found on Sept. 14 and produced during the merger of two black holes that became a single, more massive spinning black hole.

"Our observation of gravitational waves accomplishes an ambitious goal set out over five decades ago to directly detect this elusive phenomenon and better understand the universe, and, fittingly, fulfills Einstein's legacy on the 100th anniversary of his general theory of relativity," Reitze said in a statement.

<snip>

More (w/Video): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/gravitational-wave-discovery-would-open-new-window-on-the-universe_us_56bb5cc7e4b08ffac123659b

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Great ! Now the obvious next step ... phased arrays of LIGO detectors in 3D.

A global network of such detectors could extract information about relative phases and infer direction and distance for sufficiently nearby sources.

[xocet]

6. Live as of 11:26 CST: Discussion at CERN of LIGO result....NO LONGER LIVE as of 11:45 CST....

https://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/play.php?event=496299

[Qutzupalotl]

2. WHERE IS MY GOD DAMNED HOVERBOARD?!

[nichomachus]

3. Hoverboard? I want the flying car they promised me. n/t

[Wilms]

4. So a white haired dude was right.

Figures.

[mindwalker_i]

5. I was just reading an article about this, and it mentioned that a lot of energy

is taken away by gravitational waves. In this case, two black holes ~35 times the mass of our sun collided, and the energy of the gravitational waves was on the order of a couple of suns through e=mc^2. That's a lot of energy converted!

Now, about 15 years ago I read an SF book which posited making a sort of gravitational laser (gaser?). That also used black holes, but they were miniture. I'm kind of wondering whether this could be a possibility: it may be possible to make mini black holes with powerfull accelerators, and then they could be chanrged by shooting electrons into them. The black holes could then be moved with electric fields. So it should be at least possible to get two black holes vibrating in sync to set up standing gravitational waves between them.

Now for the amplification part of laser/gaser: atoms absorb energy and metastable materials stay in excited state longer before emiting energy as photons. Gravitons would be the quanta of gravity but have not been observed, so it's hard to imaging what could fill the place of the gas or other material in a laser. Would particles that have mass respond to the standing waves and is there some way they could be excited and then give that energy to the grav beam?

Probably far beyond speculative.

[SoLeftIAmRight]

7. Another bad headline - so it is with science

About 1980 Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse (Nobel Prize winners) began studying a double-neutron star system (PSR 1913 + 16 ) After 25 years they concluded that gravitational waves exist and they were able to show that Einstein's general relativity was able to confirm to observed effects to about one part in 1,000,000,000,000,000.

No the waves were not just discovered.

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. No, this is the discovery

From the Nobel Prize press release:

This change was presumed to occur because the system is emitting energy in the form of gravitational waves in accordance with what Einstein in 1916 predicted should happen to masses moving relatively to each other. According to the latest data, the theoretically calculated value from the relativity theory agrees to within about one half of a percent with the observed value. The first report of this effect was made by Taylor and co-workers at the end of 1978, four years after the discovery of the binary pulsar was reported.

The good agreement between the observed value and the theoretically calculated value of the orbital path can be seen as an indirect proof of the existence of gravitational waves. We will probably have to wait until next century for a direct demonstration of their existence. Many long-term projects have been started for making direct observations of gravitational waves impinging upon the earth. The radiation emitted by the binary pulsar is too weak to be observed on the earth with existing techniques. However, perhaps the violent perturbations of matter that take place when the two astronomical bodies in a binary star (or a binary pulsar) approach each other so closely that they fall into each other may give rise to gravitational waves that could be observed here. It is also hoped to be able to observe many other violent events in the universe. Gravitational wave astronomy is the latest, as yet unproven, branch of observational astronomy, where neutrino astronomy is the most direct predecessor. Gravitational wave astronomy would then be the first observational technique for which the basic principle was first tested in an astrophysical context. All earlier observational techniques in astronomy have been based on physical phenomena which first became known in a terrestrial connection.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1993/press.html

The idea came from a century ago, of course.

[SoLeftIAmRight]

10. ???

you talk about 1978

I talk about the period between about 1980 to 2005

My mention of the NP was just to she the credentials of some involved

Why are you supporting another bad headline - which was my point

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. The point is that the waves have not been observed before now

Taylor and Hulse's observations all fitted with the existence of the waves, which had been predicted since Einstein, but this is the first time the waves themselves been observed.

[SoLeftIAmRight]

12. No No No

the point is - another bad science headline

[WillyT]

8. MORE HERE:

Link: http://www.rawstory.com/2016/02/gravitational-waves-are-the-physics-discovery-of-the-century-heres-how-it-happened-and-what-it-means/

[hue]

13. "Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Provides Direct Evidence of

Gravitational Waves!"

How do You All like this headline?