Exciting news: Gravitational Waves detected!
Submitted on 11 Feb 2016 16:04:09 UTC
We want to share our excitement about the first-ever direct detection of gravitational waves! The event happened right before the beginning of the first observing run of the advanced LIGO detectors, on 14 September 2015. The waves were generated as two black holes merged into a single black hole about 1.3 billion light years from Earth. In astronomy units this is 410 Mpc, approximately 10% of the way across the visible Universe!
Just as exciting: this is also the first-ever observation of binary black holes. In fact, since black holes are black, and emit no light or electromagnetic radiation, this is the only way we can see them.
Did Einstein@Home play any role in this? No, it didn’t. The signal in the instrument lasted only about 1/4 of a second. It’s not a continuous-wave signal like the type that Einstein@Home has been searching for. But since the observing run ended in mid January, we have been preparing the data to start a new low-frequency all-sky search for continuous gravitational waves. We are now starting to run this on Einstein@Home, so please sign up your computers and disable their sleep mode! In the next months we will extend the frequency range of the continuous waves all-sky searches, target interesting point sources and we are also gearing up to perform broader surveys for binary black hole mergers.
Bruce Allen
Director, Einstein@Home
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Comments
Isn't there a satellite up
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Isn't there a satellite up there that measures the strength of Gravity at different places on the earths surface, and has come up with some surprising results where it is quite different in a local area without any apparent reason. I'm sure I read about it somewhere.
Waiting for Godot & salvation :-)
Why do doctors have to practice?
You'd think they'd have got it right by now
RE: All science is
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I fully agree.
Cheers
JF
The gravity acceleration is
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The gravity acceleration is different, even in a small amount, from place to place. Some of my climbing friends, going to an expedition in Turkey, received a gravimeter from prof. Antonio Marussi, a geologist with accompanied the K2 Italian team in 1954, with task of measuring it in their wanderings. Unfortunately, they broke it and had to go to the Herr Professor and say we are guilty. But he pardoned them, being also an alpinist.
Tullio
RE: Isn't there a satellite
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The GRACE mission.
The GRACE follow-on mission will use the same technology to monitor the distance between the satellites that we use to detect gravitational waves.
BM
BM
Cool figures and animations
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Cool figures and animations on the wiki page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Recovery_and_Climate_Experiment
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." A. Einstein
BTW, if someone here would
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BTW, if someone here would like to buy a T-shirt or pajamas or coffee mug or whatnot with the first ever observed GW signal printed on it, visit the updated LIGO Scientific Collaboration store here:
http://www.cafepress.com/ligosc/13318299 :-)
Support from China
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Support from China
Congratulations! @tachs:
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Congratulations!
@tachs: Just make sure that your GPU product (GPU app) is less intruding on everyday work...so we can crunch it without "hick-ups" on GPUs or in other words while writing some texts, mails, working in some text editors, surfing, etc...
;)
non-profit org. Play4Life in Zagreb, Croatia, EU
RE: RE: Isn't there a
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There was also ESA's GOCE mission, though I don't know how much overlap there is. It'll be interesting to see what adding LISA technology to these measurements will end up showing us :)
Yes the GRACE mission that
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Yes the GRACE mission that was the one. Many thanks for reminding me I am most grateful :-)
Waiting for Godot & salvation :-)
Why do doctors have to practice?
You'd think they'd have got it right by now
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/j
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http://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/pulsar-web-could-detect-low-frequency-gravitational-waves
I think there is even an
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I think there is even an effect of the detection of GW on the number of E@h users.
Nice!
Excellent panel discussion of
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Excellent panel discussion of LIGO by people on the project and the detection.
Ripples in Spacetime: Our New Window On the Universe