Gravitational Waves Detected

[rwenzori]

LIGO announcement happening.

Off Twitter:

Sean Carroll ‏@seanmcarroll

We have detected gravitational waves! #LIGO #applause

Max Planck Society ‏@maxplanckpress

On September 14th 2015 "both LIGO detectors detected a very specific signal"

 

[koeksGHT]

Meh, SONA gonna be more interesting

 

[Fulcrum29]

LIGO announcement happening.

Off Twitter:

Interesting,

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35524440

Scientists are claiming a stunning discovery in their quest to fully understand gravity.

They have observed the warping of space-time generated by the collision of two black holes more than a billion light-years from Earth.

The international team says the first detection of these gravitational waves will usher in a new era for astronomy.

It is the culmination of decades of searching and could ultimately offer a window on the Big Bang.

 

[OCP]

This confirms Einstein's theory as was expected. Exciting news for a few geeks like me

 

[mercurial]

Saw this on twitter as well. Absolutely amazing. Well done.

 

[mercurial]

Why is this important?

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016...-are-finally-closing-in-on-einsteins-ripples/

 

[rwenzori]

Lawrence M. Krauss ‏@LKrauss1

The chirp heard round the world. Gravitational wave frequency in the audible range.

!!

Edit:
How researchers succeed in tracking down gravitational waves
http://www.mpg.de/9939333/cosmos-quakes

Edit:
Paper apparently at ( but timing out now ):
http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102

 

[OrbitalDawn]

Gravitational waves: discovery hailed as breakthrough of the century

Physicists have announced the discovery of gravitational waves, ripples in spacetime first anticipated by Albert Einstein a century ago.

“We have detected gravitational waves. We did it,” said David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo), at a press conference in Washington.

The announcement is the climax of a century of speculation, 50 years of trial and error, and 25 years perfecting a set of instruments so sensitive they could identify a distortion in spacetime a thousandth the diameter of one atomic nucleus across a 4km strip of laserbeam and mirror.

The phenomenon was detected by the collision of two black holes. Using the world’s most sophisticated detector, the scientists listened for 20 thousandths of a second as the two giant black holes, one 35 times the mass of the sun, the other slightly smaller, circled around each other.

 

[OrbitalDawn]

LIGO Sees First Ever Gravitational Waves As Two Black Holes Eat Each Other

Better start shining up some new Nobel Prize medals: Scientists have reported that, for the very first time in history, they have detected gravitational waves.

And oh my yes, this is a very big deal. It will open up an entirely new field of astronomy, a new way to observe the Universe. Seriously.

Gravitational waves (not to be confused with gravity waves, which are a totally different thing) are ripples in the fabric of spacetime, caused when a massive object is accelerated. By the time they get here from distant astronomical objects, the waves have incredibly low energy and are phenomenally difficult to detect, which is why it’s taken a century to discover them since they were first predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Essentially every other prediction of GR has been found to be correct, but the existence of gravitational waves has been maddeningly difficult to prove directly.

Until now. And what caused the gravitational waves they detected at LIGO is as amazing and mind-blowing as the waves themselves: They caught the death spiral and aftermath of two huge black holes 1.3 billion light years from Earth merging together in a titanic and catastrophically violent event.

Mind you, we’ve had some good evidence such binary black holes existed before this, but this new result pretty much proves they exist and that, over time, they eventually collide and merge. That’s huge.

 

[Gnarls]

Incredible. I've got some reading to do. Thanks

 

[OrbitalDawn]

Gravitational Waves: 6 Cosmic Questions They Can Tackle

The discovery of ripples in space-time will vindicate Einstein—but it can also do so much more

 

[Moosedrool]

Cool stuffs. I read a few weeks ago that Lawrence Krauss rumored this here and there before the press conference. lol Sneaky theoretical Physicists are sneaky.

 

[OrbitalDawn]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/ligo-gravitational-waves-black-holes-einstein.html

Video in link is worth a watch. Beautiful.

 

[dabean]

Awesome stuff. I wonder if we'll be able to stick mirrors and lasers into the Lagrangian points and make massive interferometers.

 

[Moosedrool]

Awesome stuff. I wonder if we'll be able to stick mirrors and lasers into the Lagrangian points and make massive interferometers.

That would be a fookin crazy yet insanely good idea.

Just... how would we insure a satellite doesn't move 4000ths of a atom's nucleus?

 

[rwenzori]

Sean Carroll's take on it.

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/02/11/gravitational-waves-at-last/

 

[dabean]

That would be a fookin crazy yet insanely good idea.

Just... how would we insure a satellite doesn't move 4000ths of a atom's nucleus?

Yeah I have no idea if it would be possible or not. More of a sci-fi idea than anything else.

It would be interesting to know what the benefits of upping the scale massively would be though. If something on a solar system sized scale could provide enough resolution to say spot incoming asteroids, it might be worth the effort.

 

[Thor]

Awesome stuff. I wonder if we'll be able to stick mirrors and lasers into the Lagrangian points and make massive interferometers.

In English please

 

[ponder]

Awesome stuff. I wonder if we'll be able to stick mirrors and lasers into the Lagrangian points and make massive interferometers.

They already have mirrors bouncing the light around a couple of hundred times else the interferometer would be too short to be effective. Think it works out to about 1500km with the mirrors.

 

[ponder]

In English please

Over a short distance it's hard to measure 'interference' due to the high speed light travels at. The tunnel the light travels down is about 4km in length, still to short so they bounce the light back & forth along the 4km several hundred times to increase the distance to about ~1500km.