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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.
Is this some sort of joke? We know exactly what they're measurements of: gravitational waves. It's right there in the name.
Are you trying to claim that we don't know how to interpret them? We know exactly how to interpret them - that's why we started looking for them in the first place, because we knew what they should look like. This isn't some sort of cryptic white noise, things like the inspiraling of binary pairs have very distinctive signatures.
Beyond knowing what types of things are making the very distinctive signatures, we also have directional information, thanks to the use of multiple detectors.
What exactly do you consider to be the best avenue to gather data to study gravity if not studying the most major aspect of gravity that we had previously been unable to study but now can?
Okay, as this conversation is going into fringe territory, it ends here.
Did he just go crazy and fall asleep?
It's HUGE actually,
The very first practical application of understanding how gravity works would be ... Artificial Gravity'.
Pretty important and a *really nice to have* for growing plants and keeping humans and possibly animals healthy in low-grav like the moon, space. Or defeating the forces of acceleration and deceleration etc. Anywhere a force must be exerted or defeated.
Sure it's in an infant state of understanding right now, but the more we learn about how it works, the closer we come to making the above happen.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
To be more precise, first we have to collect a lot of data, and then we have to build a mathematical model that describes how it works, and then we *might* be able to manipulate it, depending on what comes of the model.
My first thought would be communication with extremely long range that can easily pass through objects much larger than our sun. Hell, for all we know, this is how aliens do interstellar communication, and we presently lack the ability to intercept it.