Ligo finds a third set of colliding black holes.
Are you impressed?
Yup.
Go science!
Here is a fun little interview with one of the scientists who works at the detector. He certainly has the quirky scientist role nailed. I especially like the bit at the end, just how many more events is he hiding up his sleeve?
I’m impressed not only by the accomplishments of LIGO itself, but by the fact that it is opening up an entirely new spectrum, and indeed, a new fundamental mechanism for astronomy. We’ve so far been limited to swaths of the electromagnetic spectrum, and with orbiting astronomies we’ve been able to cover most of the useful spectrum including the bandwidths that are absorbed by our atmosphere (not that we’re anywhere close to observing and interpreting everything in those spectrums, and in fact we’re coping with the problem of “Collossal Data”, where we have so much data it is difficult to even store and categorize it in a usable fashion) but now we can observe phenomena that we’d never see in the electromagnetic spectrum, including the potential of communication between alien intelligences across vast interstellar distances which would far more likely use coherent gravity waves, which are capable of being propagated without distortion or absorption over thousands of light years or further versus radio, visible, or X-ray signals.
Gravitational wave astronomy will become to this century what radio astronomy was to the previous century, and radio astronomy turned our view of the universe from being relatively static foxtrot of stars to highly dynamic congo line interrupted by hip hop and disco. We may hope to see radical new ideas and mechanics of astrophysics from LIGO and subsequent gravitational observatories, hopefully starting with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna gravitational wave observatory.
Stranger
If you have advanced scientific training in astrophysics, you can read the paper in Physical Review Letters
An interesting idea. Do you have a link to any theoretical work done on this?
Yes, I’m also wondering about this idea of communicating with gravity waves that Stranger on a Train has mentioned before. How is that supposed to work? Are there going to be be civilizations withe the ability to wiggle around black holes at will?
Although the only way we habe to make gravitational waves is to shake or rotate masses around–and we cannot move enough mass to make the gravitational equivalent of a fart in a windstorm by any conventional means–an alien species with a better understanding of gravitation and advanced technology might be able to produce coherent gravity pulses and wavepackets, or a “carrier wave” with frequency, amplitude, or polarization modulation by some controlled means just as we generate modulated electromagnetic waves with an electronic oscillator and modulator. The advantage of this is that gravitational waves can essentially propagate forever, whereas electromagnetic waves are absorbed and diffused by normal matter, limiting the effective range. Our most powerful transmissions (from strategic early warning ballistic missile radars) could only be distinguished from the electromagnetic background at about 1000 light years even with a receiving antenna the size of our planetary system and only if they were aimed directly at the receiver.
I haven’t read any direct speculation on hypothetical alien civilizations using gravitational waves for communications, nor would we have the means to detect them with anything like our very primitive capability, but it would make far more sense than using radio or laser transmission, and would also explain why, if such civilizations exist around us, we wouldn’t see communication signals. But regardless of that possibility, the ability to view gravitational waves will give us new insights into the natural mechanisms of astrophysics on scales and in phenomena that radio, optical, and X-ray astronomy cannot.
Stranger
Niven’s classic short story “The Hole Man” was based on an alien gravitational-wave communication device, if you call that “direct speculation”.
While I would love to see LISA or something like it fly, I don’t actually think it’s the logical next step. I think that the next step, now that we’ve proven that LIGO works, and we’ve done the R&D on it, is to build about three or four more LIGO installations (I’ve heard that there’s already one in India in the works). More detectors, spread across the globe, will allow us to get much better sky localization, and also lets you get a lot more use out of coincidence matching in distinguishing signal from noise. And that last bit is important, because currently the only reliable way to pick out signals is via template matching, which shackles us to only observing sources that we expect to observe.
Of course, the other detectors don’t strictly speaking need to be LIGOs. They’re already analyzing LIGO data together with data from the Italian VIRGO and the German GEO, and will be with the Japanese KAGRA once it’s operational. But none of those other detectors yet has the sensitivity of LIGO, and we know how to make a LIGO already.
And even if we had a LIGO or equivalent-quality detector, or a bunch of them, on every continent, we’d still want to build LISA and its successors, because they work in a different frequency range, and hence detect a different category of sources and can answer different questions.
My mom loves Ligo. She’s seen that Hilgado movie a hundred times.