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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."
http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/
Posting as AC to avoid karma whoring.
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.
First, the direct detection of gravitational waves would confirm certain aspects of the theory of general relativity, as other posters have noted.
Second, gravitational wave detectors will provide us with a new window to the universe. Ordinary stars emit mostly visible light, so ordinary optical telescopes are well suited to their study. Cold clouds of interstellar gas emit mostly radio waves, so radio telescopes are the best choice to study them. We know of certain objects --- relatively uncommon ones -- which ought to produce a good deal of gravitational radiation: very massive objects moving very quickly, such as pairs of black holes or neutron stars orbiting around each other at small distances. Gravitational wave detectors will allow astronomers to study the properties of these objects more precisely than we can with ordinary telescopes (since they do not emit much electromagnetic radiation).
Finally, it is possible (though I suspect unlikely) that the universe may contain a whole class (or classes) of objects which are currently unknown to us, but which will appear as strong sources of gravitational radiation. Almost every time astronomers have added a new type of telescope to their toolkit, they have stumbled across previously unknown phenomena. The first gamma-ray telescopes, for example, revealed gamma-ray bursts, which were completely undetected (and unexpected) by other means in the late sixties and early seventies.
One last note: LIGO and other gravitational wave detectors provide very poor angular resolution, compared to ordinary optical telescopes. They will tell us something like "a source of gravitational waves is over there, about 10 degrees above the horizon at 5 degrees south of East." The "error circle" for a typical detection will be a few degrees in size. It may be quite a challenge for astronomers to identify the optical counterpart to a new source of gravitational waves, since there will usually be thousands to millions of optical sources within the error box of a gravitational wave detection.
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
Some people want to live forever, some people just want to understand the universe. Its really a matter of personal preference.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".