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Computer Simulations Point To the Source of Gravitational Waves (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via The Verge: On February 11th, scientists at the LIGO observatory made history when they announced the detection of the first gravitational waves. A new study says the gravitational waves likely came from two massive suns that formed about 12 billion years ago, or two billion years after the Big Bang. The researcher's calculations have been published today in the journal Nature, and were determined by running a complex simulation called the Synthetic Universe: a computer model that simulates how the Universe may have evolved since the start of the Big Bang. The simulation even includes a synthetic LIGO detector to determine the types of objects that the observatory would detect over time. The Synthetic Universe can also make predictions as it includes a mock-LIGO to chronologically sync when we detected the waves. If the model is correct, we should see LIGO pick up to 60 detections when it begins its next observation run this fall. It could hear up to 1,000 detections annually at its peak sensitivity. The lead study author Chris Belczynski speculates specifically the size of black hole mergers that the LIGO should be able to detect from gravitational waves, a combined mass between 20 and 80 times the mass of our sun, indicating that they're likely from soon after the Big Bang when stars had lower metal content and formed proportionately larger black holes. His model suggests that the ones that collided to make these gravitational waves were stars that formed 12 billion years ago, became black holes 5 million years later, and then merged 10.3 billion years after that.
What is the practical value of this? Nobody will ever visit the source of the gravitational waves. Furthermore, there's already abundant evidence supporting relativity (which does have practical uses) so I don't see what gravitational waves actually do that matters.
Thank you! Sometimes the answer is right in front of us.
> "The simulation even includes a synthetic LIGO detector to determine the types of objects that the observatory would detect over time."
Does the simulation also include a synthetic simulation in order to determine what it would find out by simulating the universe ?
What seems more interesting? When the stars that were the precursors to the blackholes were formed, or when the event actually happened? I would have much preferred seeing an emphasis on the fact that the event happened 1.7 billion years ago, rather than than the stars that originated the chain of events were formed 12 billion years ago...
This is the CORRECT answer, but few here will acknowledge it. They don't want to give Jesus any credit, ever.
It's doubtful you'll find any reference to "gravitational waves" in "the book". This is how work religions: a guy writes a lot of things that could be true at time t in order to convince people (gain power), but these things do not make sense anymore at time t + x years thanks to advances in technology and science. But even nowadays many people prefer to believe in historical religious values, thanks to ignorance.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
That's only because he doesn't show any fiscal responsibility. He's always giving his money away to the poor and lepers, getting in trouble with the law, etc. If we moneychangers were to extend him a line of credit, why should we expect to ever get paid back?
Not that I'd want to tell him that to his face - the last time he stopped by he trashed the place and started attacking us with a whip. That guy is mental.
Did he just go crazy and fall asleep?
Seriously? 11 Comments and NO ONE called out slashdot for claiming the stars formed 12 billion years ago and took 10 MORE billion years to spiral together? No one sees anything wrong with this? Arithmetic not a strong point here, huh? Yeah the stars formed almost 9 billion years before the Big Bang, sure.
see above. Time to wake up and take my meds. Sorry all
Read a book sometime! The GOOD book!
Ya'll motherfuckers need Talos.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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Umm, Day 3 of creation thank you very much!
Well maybe you were being a bad person, Jesus hates that.
I love when they make up the rules, then tweak the numbers/simulation until they get proof of what they want to prove.
Seriously, when you make up the math to prove your point on the fly (which is what all theoretical physics does) its not impressive for the simulation to agree with your prediction, you programed it that way!
Thats like calling the game Prey a simulator and proof we can make anti-gravity devices.
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If they can detect a gravitational wave that's 12 billion years old, why can't they detect the biggest and very first gravitational wave?
The one created by the Big Bang?
Agreed. This seems like a lot of wasted effort just to say God did it.
Just be good little followers and obey your dirty instead of questioning His every creation, people! God will love you either way, but only your reciprocation will grant you eternal salvation!
Come now, the real question of reality is. . . Who will be eaten FIRST ???
This message brought to you, by the Campus Crusade for Cthulhlu: It found me !!
Umm, Day 3 of creation thank you very much!
Sure, what, about 6000 years ago? My Faith is Science. Personally, I reject your Sky Fairy brand of Faith, but if it floats your boat, you're welcome to it. Just leave it at the door with your muddy boots.
Umm, Day 3 of creation thank you very much!
Hmm. I'm a bit rusty but I don't remember the bible saying, "And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years, and then allowed a supermassive Wolf-Rayet star to collapse into two supermassive black holes, which circled each other for a bit then collided releasing colossal amounts of energy in gravitational waves."
Srsly?
... came from two massive stars...
The Sun. Sun is a proper noun. Our Sun is a star. There are billions of stars. There's only one Sun – ours.
Sheesh
My boat is named "Millions of Years" and every night it floats the dead sun God Ra through passages under the Earth, where he rises and rides through the heavens again each day.
I reject this new false religion where a god only rises once and wasn't even put back together from 7 scattered pieces like Osiris was!
What's wrong with a little honest profit?
Are you some kind of commie socialist wacko or something?
Read a book sometime! The GOOD book!
This one ?
https://www.amazon.com/Good-Bo...
Dirty? Apparently your autocorrect doesn't believe in God, either!
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Science is the same way.
Freaking historians REFUSED for decades that the Norse were here in the americas way before any europeans and they dismissed all found evidence as "hoaxes" even though the evidence pool was sound and well documented.
Go ahead and try and overturn a science cart with a new hypothesis and see how welcoming scientists are. It's as much of a cult following in the science circles as it is in religious cults.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Imagine if it was written, how weird would that be! Like magic dude in the guy garbage intermixed with real physics, it'd be mind bending.
Yes, there are a lot of bad scientists doing bad science. But at least science tries to approach the mysteries of the universe in an objective and open minded way.
His model suggests that the ones that collided to make these gravitational waves were stars that formed 12 billion years ago, became black holes 5 million years later, and then merged 10.3 billion years after that.
Did he do his experiment 3.3 billion years in the future?
Of course, it could just be a typo...
Well maybe you were being a bad person, Jesus hates that.
Yet proclaims to love the sinner... F'ing hypocrite.
Have a look at the Europe map again. See Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Iceland? That's were the "Norse" came from. It's Europe.
-- Make America hate again!
They still can't find his penis. All the other gods are still laughing. Dick jokes and cruelty are basically the highest of arts to gods.
Yeah, well, Forget that. I mean do you know how the universe began for a kick off?
ARTHUR:
Well probably not
FORD:
Alright imagine this: you get a large round bath made of ebony.
ARTHUR:
Where from? Harrod’s was destroyed by the Vogons.
FORD:
Well it doesn’t matter -
ARTHUR:
So you keep saying!
FORD:
No, No listen. Just imagine that you’ve got this ebony bath, right? And it’s conical.
ARTHUR:
Conical? What kind of bath is -
FORD:
No, no, shh, shhh, it’s, it’s, it’s conical okay? So what you do, you fill it with fine white sand right? Or sugar, or anything like that. And when it’s full, you pull the plug out and it all just twirls down out of the plug hole but the thing is
ARTHUR:
Why?
FORD:
No, the clever thing is that you film it happening. You get a movie camera from somewhere and actually film it. But then you thread the film in the projector backwards.
ARTHUR:
Backwards?
FORD:
Yeah, neat you see. So what happens is you sit and you watch it and then everything appears to swirl upwards, out of the plug hole and fill the bath amazing.
ARTHUR:
And that’s how the universe began?
God is an executive. He proposed there be light and matter, then left the details to the engineers.
John Titor said something about this; didn't he?
God is a world leader. He makes a bunch of major, life-or-death decisions that affect billions of people, then goes on vacation and clears brush on his ranch for much of his term.
And that’s how the universe began?
No, but its a great way to unwind.
(Or something like that - I can't find my copy of the scripts, which is winding me up).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
When I'm president, we'll have smart messiahs, not stupid, loser messiahs. Tremendous, tremendous messiahs, on the classiest crosses.
#CrookedJesus.
You are welcome on my lawn.
[Citation needed]
The first actual Viking discovery in the Americas, L'Anse aux Meadows, was not particularly controversial. Yes, there were things dismissed as hoaxes before that, like the Kensington Runestone. That's because they were hoaxes.
The problem wasn't that people "disbelieved" claims of Norse settlement - it's that most people were simply unaware of them. There wasn't a great deal of interest outside of places like Iceland in the history of viking exploration until the early 20th century. Around the start of the 20th century there started being an increasing debate as to whether they referred to real places and if so where they were located. Expeditions really began to find them in the 1950s - Jørgen Meldgaard came extremely close, only about 15km from the site at L'Anse Aux Meadows, while following up on earlier suggestions by Tanner and Munn. The only physical find that Meldgaard found significant wasn't found in Canada or the US at all - it was from Greenland, an arrowhead in a viking settlement that matched Canadian native materials (ramah chert) and styles rather than Greenlandic. The Canadian government had offered significant support for his explorations (the Danish National Museum however was more hesitant, preferring that Meldgaard focus his research more on Native American cultures).
The biggest controvery that arose after Ingestad's excavation at L'Anse Aux Meadows was not people insisting that it was fake, but rather a row between Denmark and Norway as to who gets the credit for discovering it first. Denmark went back and tried to push Meldgaard's role in helping find the location (although he never did find any artifacts), and there was a lot of hostility in the Danish and Norwegian press over the issue (for what its worth, Meldgaard and Ingestad had a friendly relationship)
Did he just go crazy and fall asleep?
Yes, let's dismiss the validity of all books that don't mention gravitational waves.
Fool.
Agreed. Maybe even a little context - assuming gravity waves propagate at the speed of light (consistent with the rate of energy loss we see in stellar binaries spinning down) 1.7 billion years ago translates to (roughly) 1.7 billion light years away, about 680 times further away than the Andromeda galaxy. Still practically next door in cosmic terms, so inflation isn't going to fudge the numbers too much.
I'm not certain exactly how gravitational waves propagate, nor how energy levels correlate to geometric distortion, but I would assume that energy levels fade with the usual inverse-square law, and geometric distortion varies linearly with amplitude. Assuming gravity waves follow the usual energy-amplitude relationship, energy is proportional to the square of the amplitude. And so we get 1/r^2 ~ e ~ A^2, or A ~1/r, so that we would expect the geometric distortion to fade linearly with distance.
So, if that's the case, we'd expect a signal from a similar merger in Andromeda to be 680 times more powerful, and from a merger in the farthest reaches of the visible Milky Way to be about 14,000x more powerful, or 71,000x more powerful if it came from near the galactic core or closest edge of the galaxy.
That being the case, I've got to wonder exactly how insane the gravitational waves from a black hole merger are compared to the relatively steady fast-orbiting binary stars we can see via more traditional means? Are such waves theoretically too weak for us to detect with LIGO, or is it just that the signal-analysis is only looking for the distinctive "spike" from a black hole merger as a sort of low-hanging fruit to prove that gravity waves do in fact exist?
Perhaps the more interesting question for me is, just how much will the proposed eLISA mission, with it's 250,000x longer arms (and I presume 250,000x greater sensitivity, plus much lower ambient noise levels) be able to detect? Being able to directionally detect the gravity waves from fast-orbiting binary stars, that we can then correlate with more traditional telescopy, could give us incredible insight into the workings of gravity waves including, in the case of binaries unmistakably spinning down, confirming whether the waves actually propagate at lightspeed.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Ummm, NO. it don't.
That is what the OP is trying to demonstrate with historical references. You on the other hand are flag/hand waving.
Science has been the lapdog of government since the A-bomb grants were so profitable.
Fuckemall they're liberal commie shits.
herp derp much?
He is talking Coloumbus like the freaking US historians cling to like herpies to a whore.
The Good book is the Old Testament, but I now nominate Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" - Hey, if you don't understand the benefit of science, maybe you would like to forgo the fruits of Applied Sciences. such as ......yes, electronics, optics, and semiconductors.
The way they are describing this phenomenon sounds like gravitational waves travel at a particular speed. I was hoping that they somehow broke the speed of light barrier so we could have zero-latency communication. Although I suppose they wouldn't be 'waves' if the effect of gravity was instantaneous...
bummer... Although if the force of gravity is in step with the speed of light, there might be a correlation to be made about the nature of those two forces, one being cosmic one being quantum...