Any results from Einstein@home?
10 Oct 2007 19:30:47 UTC
Topic 193211
(moderation:
Hi,
I'm new here and I was just wondering: Has Einstein@home ever have yield any kind of result? Maybe something like
- Eureka! We discovered gravitational waves! (Apparently hasn't happened yet ;-))
- We know areas where definitely no sources of gravitational waves in detectable range exist.
- We improved with the help of E@H the probability distribution of where (or where not) to find these sources
If some site exists where I can read about the results, please forgive and indulge me :-)
I'm sorry if I sound a little skeptic about this project. Yet I think it's quite interesting ;-)
Any results from Einstein@home?
)
There are links to the S3 run from the front page.
e.g. First report on the S3 analysis and Final report on the S3 analysis.
The results from the S4 run
)
The results from the S4 run is under internal review by the scientists and will be released "soon", I guess.
Every run in E@H has a result: either you find something or you establish a new upper limit, that is you can prove that any continuous gravitational wave in the frequency band investigated that hits Earth must be weaker than what the run would have discovered. For example we now know there's no strong source of continuous gravitational waves "next door". The upper limit gets better and better with each run until we reach a point where we
a) find a wave source
or
b) begin to suspect that the theory is wrong because we should have discovered something if it were right. This would be an even greater result, like the outcome of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment that shook the foundations of Physics at that time.
CU
Bikeman
Thanks for the interesting
)
Thanks for the interesting answer!
Excellent answer! A few
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Excellent answer!
A few comments:
We intend to publish them before the end of this year.
It took us much longer than expected to develop the post-processing pipeline for S4. It currently looks straightforward to pipe the results of S5R1/S5RI through the same pipeline, which should give a much shorter delay than we had for S4.
My very personal opinion on this is that if we don't find what we are looking for I'd rather expect something to be wrong with the search than with Einstein's theory. It might be some technical issue with the detectors or the data analysis, but I guess most likely there would be something wrong with our idea of how a gravitational wave looks like.
BM
BM