Gravitational Waves finally detected!
- Thread starter guiller
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grillebilly
Empty Head
I just heard this on the radio, big-time discovery. Thanks for posting, I will read it now.
Very interesting and at the same time inconceivable to me, the fact people can figure this out and also record a wave from over 1 billion years ago.
Very interesting and at the same time inconceivable to me, the fact people can figure this out and also record a wave from over 1 billion years ago.
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I detected this gravitational wave a minute ago.
"So close your eyes, for that's a lovely way to be...." -Frank Sinatra
DrumminDaddy
Hit it, Baby !!
How the heck do you isolate movement to within a ten thousandth of a proton? I would think the very ground that the detector is built on would be less stable than that. They must have some crazy compensation schemes. 
How the heck do you isolate movement to within a ten thousandth of a proton? I would think the very ground that the detector is built on would be less stable than that. They must have some crazy compensation schemes.
Ready for this?
The simplest detector measures changes in the resonant frequency of a metal bar - so sound, basically...
The better detectors use really big lasers encased in large vacuums - so tubes...
All this vintage stuff we play with here? It's really cutting edge quantum physics devices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational-wave_observatory
guiller
Toscaninichus Australis
How the heck do you isolate movement to within a ten thousandth of a proton? I would think the very ground that the detector is built on would be less stable than that. They must have some crazy compensation schemes.
Light interferometry!
uenjoymyself
Surrender to the flow
I have no idea what you guys are talking about but I do understand "surfs up" and I like the pretty girl!
Ahhhh. The question of discretes remains: Is it particles? or is it waves? (cf. electromagnetic radiation: particles? or waves? Why yes, but not at the same time of observation.)
Enjoy,
Rich P
Enjoy,
Rich P
I find her wave very gravitational.
I have some idea what they're talking about, but I am way too old to really comprehend it. I'll stick with pretty girls waving.
It is such a tragedy: even more stuff I will never understand...
Lao-Tzu would answer your question this way: "TAO threw the stone!"
No kidding.
No kidding.
DrumminDaddy
Hit it, Baby !!
Quoted from the Wikipedia article, this is what I was wondering about. Basically, you've got two tubes that are two and a half miles long. Your goal is to measure movement along these axis relative to one another. You've got the tectonics of the earth, tidal forces of the Moon and Sun. Thermal changes. **** is moving around more than the sizes you're trying to measure. Then they mention the noise of the lasers themselves, photons bouncing around and whatnot. These folks are some fart smuckers.
"Interferometric detectors are limited at high frequencies by shot noise, which occurs because the lasers produce photons randomly; one analogy is to rainfall – the rate of rainfall, like the laser intensity, is measurable, but the raindrops, like photons, fall at random times, causing fluctuations around the average value. This leads to noise at the output of the detector, much like radio static. In addition, for sufficiently high laser power, the random momentum transferred to the test masses by the laser photons shakes the mirrors, masking signals at low frequencies. Thermal noise (e.g., Brownian motion) is another limit to sensitivity. In addition to these "stationary" (constant) noise sources, all ground-based detectors are also limited at low frequencies by seismic noise and other forms of environmental vibration, and other "non-stationary" noise sources; creaks in mechanical structures, lightning or other large electrical disturbances, etc. may also create noise masking an event or may even imitate an event. All these must be taken into account and excluded by analysis before a detection may be considered a true gravitational-wave event."