New Distributed Project Seeks Gravity Waves

fenimor writes "Much like the popular SETI@Home distributed computing project that searches radio telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial life, the new Einstein@Home will search for gravitational waves in data collected by U.S. and European gravitational wave detectors. Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916, but only now has technology reached the point that scientists hope to detect them directly."

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Relevant link

[Anonymous Coward]

http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/

Posting as AC to avoid karma whoring.

Re:What do gravity waves tell us?

[turnstyle]

"What do gravity waves tell us that EM radiation doesn't?"

It would be another confirmation of Einstein's theory. Some more background here.

And here's some about a recent satellite also hoping to establish the existence of gravity waves.

Re:What do gravity waves tell us?

[cot]

If you detect gravity waves from sources like supernovae, black hole collisions, etc. you're confirming that Einstein's GR works and that the properties of the waves (ie amplitude, duration) make sense for that particular source.

If you can detect primordial gravity waves from the very early universe(harder!), you now have an indication that inflation (rapid expansion) of the universe is a reasonable cosmological model rather than its current somewhat ad hoc status. It nicely explains away some problems with simpler models, but no real direct test has been performed to show that it happened.

LIGO project

[karvind]

Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory from Caltech is working on same subject. LIGO will search for gravitational waves created in supernova collapses of stellar cores (which form neutron stars and black holes), collisions and coalescences of neutron stars or black holes, rotations of neutron stars with deformed crusts and the remnants of gravitational radiation created by the birth of the universe. LIGO is a joint project between scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Re:What do gravity waves tell us?

[LionMan]

Sorry, gravity probe B (the recent satellite) is not trying to confirm the existence of gravity waves. GPB is looking for "frame dragging," another predicted effect of general relativity. Gyroscopes in GPB should precess, despite the fact that they are over the poles of the earth and (to first order, excluding motion about the sun and the motion of our solar system itself) not in a rotating frame. Even though the gyroscopes won't be in a rotating frame, their spacetime metric will be 'dragged' by the rotating massive earth, causing a precession of some parts of arcseconds (check the web page for more).