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'First Lock' At Laser Interferometer

Posted by michael on from the hole-in-the-middle-of-it-all dept.

alanb0 writes: "The LIGO project, which is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to look for gravity waves and confirm general relativity, announced 'first lock' on Friday, which is analogous to 'first light' for a new telescope. Here's a story about it ..."

7 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. sensitivity by jimmy_whacked · · Score: 4

    i listened to a lecture by an applied mathematician modelling gravity waves and he mentioned that the instrument was so sensitive that the scientists were forced to compensate for the movements of the ocean over 300 miles away. it is mindboggling to think that this detector could be thrown off by anything that remote, but that helps to illistrate the challenges the researchers face.

  2. Re:This is good, but... by KjetilK · · Score: 4
    Patience, my friend, patience.... :-) It's really, really hard. First, spherically symmetric objects don't send out gravity waves, so the moon, the sun, most stars, etc, will emit very little. However, there are lots of things that will, some things are very far out in the Universe. In my personal opinion, it's not so much a matter about testing GR, I think that it is very certain that gravity waves exist, I think it is a matter of learning how to use them.

    So, first, you would have to detect them, then, perhaps you connect them to events, e.g. Gamma Ray Bursts, then you may be able to tell if it comes from the one direction or the other, and finally, some time in the future (when we're talking LISA), we might talk about angular resolution.

    And what that means? It opens a whole new view of the Universe. We're going to see where the matter is, directly. It's just fantastic, I'm telling you....

    For an idea of how sensitive these instruments are, I attended a lecture given by a couple of students at a German project, and they once had a signal. Well, not really, it turned out that it couldn't be gravity waves, and they search for a long time to figure out what it could be. Finally, it turned out that a local farmer had bought a heavier tractor, and that shook the ground more than they had thought....

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  3. Re:Space anyone? by Bryan+K.+Feir · · Score: 3

    I, for one, am eagerly awaiting 10^9 meter baseline radio interferometers. Also, if you build an optical interferometer of that kind of scale, you can pick out the canals on Mars from Alpha Centauri. Or vice-versa.

    Well, there's always the Japanese HALCA satellite, part of the VSOP project. This was the first working satellite for a Space VLBI mission, and it had the expected problems with dealing with interferometry between quickly moving objects. True, it's apogee is only at 21 400 km, so it's not quite at the 10^9m level, but it's close.

    While HALCA itself is nearing the end of its useful operating lifespan (There were some problems with the satellite losing its targetting that resulted in using up the maneuvering fuel faster than planned), the success of the mission has helped get the Russian Radioastron project back on its feet, and pave the way for other Space VLBI projects.

    The main problems in space interferometry have already been tested and dealt with, and there's been some work in the radio astronomy community for dual-satellite interferometry, once some of the second-genaration systems like VSOP-2 and ARISE are in space in a few years. With two satellites each with a 50 000km apogee, we can actually hit the 10^9 meter baseline level.

    (Yes, I know a moderate amount about this from my work with the S2 data recording system which is used at a number of radio observatories around the world for VLBI.)

    -- Bryan Feir

  4. If the LIGO project was like Slashdot... by faeryman · · Score: 3

    ...they'd be running around chanting 'first lock d00d!' and pouring hot grits down each others pants right now.

    But then Taco^H^H^H^Hthe project leader would bitchslap them and make them all get back to work. *sigh*

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    ,
    faeryman
  5. More information at LIGO by tmarsh_p1 · · Score: 3

    There is more information on the LIGO site: http://www.ligo-wa.caltech.edu/news /00 10han.

  6. LEGOs by GigsVT · · Score: 4

    Its amazing what they can build with Lego's these days.
    -

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  7. Is it worth half a billion dollars... by pcwhalen · · Score: 3

    ... to confirm that Einstein was right? You bet your ass. Of all the theortical physics to date has translated into some kind of everyday usefull product [a very small subset of academic physics], we now have computers from Dicky Feynman's work in quantum mechanics, space travel from Neuton's laws and really good rubber bands from the superstring theory.

    I spend a ton of money on taxes in this fine nation of ours. I write to my government officials and tell them to spend what they can on pure research and space exploration. Aside from the pure joy of knowing there is a unified theory to explain it all, it's just too cool not to do some of this stuff.

    Use my backyard for the next one of these.

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