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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.
The practical value is that we finally have a way to probe one of the biggest parts of physics that we don't actually understand, gravity. And it has direct implications for all of the other aspects that we don't understand or have major questions about, such as inflation, dark energy, the unification of relativity and quantum physics, etc. The field has massive potential to further our understanding of physics and the universe that we live in.
And LIGO is only the start. When something like eLISA comes online it'd be like going from the blurry images of Galileo's telescope to an actual astronomical observatory.
Did he just go crazy and fall asleep?
Sometimes the practical use will be revealed a lot later and result in new discoveries.
If you stop being curious then it's time to close the shop.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
> "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 is the practical value of this?
What's the practical value of you?
Furthermore, there's already abundant evidence supporting relativity (which does have practical uses)
It does now. What practical uses did it have when (or before) it was discovered?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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?
Read a book sometime! The GOOD book!
Ya'll motherfuckers need Talos.
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Assuming the big bang produced gravitational waves which is not a given as its the two massive black holes rotating around each other that creates the waves, then the simple answer is they have gone. They are no longer around to detect.
It's like being near where a large stone was thrown in the pond last year and saying why can't I detect the ripples from the splash when I can detect the ripples from that pebble you throw in over there a few seconds ago.
It is still potentially falsifiable, though. Since these formulae are all interrelated you can corroborate that the model matches for related phenomena. Then you can look for edge cases where it might break down and then further refine things.
No, what you do is see something, try to figure out how it might work and model it. At this point you probably have a model that "works" because it fits your observation - not very useful. But then you use it to predict what else you might see. If the prediction matches the next observation, it strengthens the possibility that the model might actually describe something fundamental, more and more so as it gives consistent results over many observations. If the prediction doesn't match, you figure there's something wrong with the model and start again, or you refine the model, and so on and so on.
Yeah, if only those morons who were working on quantum mechanics in the 1920's and 1930s had some understand of how little practical value their work had, we wouldn't be saddled with computers, lasers, GPS, etc. now.
Have a look at the Europe map again. See Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Iceland? That's were the "Norse" came from. It's Europe.
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Amazing how nobody can get these figures right. Million, billions, hundreds of millions, whatever, just throw them all together and don't bother to verify that it all adds up. According to Engadget, 1.2 billion plus 10.3 billion plus 5 million make 12 billion. The Slashdot comments have a bunch of other versions, but i have yet to see one that adds up.
[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?
I never saw how this differed from the Michelson-Morley experiment, and could equally show the existence of luminiferous ether.
Well, they are different.
The Michelson-Morely experiment was a failure: it was designed to observe changes in the speed of light in different reference frames, but it showed none. And that result changed our understanding of the universe in fundamental ways.
These gravitational-wave observations, and their subsequent simulations, appear to be a success for the theory of general relativity. And that's important too.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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.
DO YOU understand how they work, cause you clearly don't since you're trying to make a snarky comment. ITS THEORETICAL. THERES YOUR SIGN.
Not sure why I bother to reply but:
n => f(n)
1 => 2
2 => 4
3 => 8
4 => 16
5 => 32
6 => 64
7 => 128
8 => 256
Find the function. I'm sure you could argue that you could make many other silly functions that'd also work, but 2^n seems like a good guess. That's what theoretical physicists do in a nutshell, look at observations and try to come up with formulas that fit. If you get new observations that don't fit, you try again. The more complicated it is and the less you can decompose forces, the harder it gets. Try for example to observe objects falling and decompose gravity from air resistance without putting anything in a vacuum. It's hard and you'd probably have to tweak the formula quite a bit. But if it works when you're done, what's the problem? Eventually you find something that's right most of the time like Newton, until somebody discovers relativity and then it's back to tweaking the formula with the Lorentz factor. But I'm sure you think shysters like Einstein were just fudging Newton's formulas too.
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They are making very specific predictions about the number and type of collisions they will detect when LIGO comes back online in the fall. That's pretty much the definition of falsifiable.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Well, I didn't read that anywhere... Where can one read about that, the formation of matter and antimatter? And how is hydrogen the byproduct of that? I thought hydrogen was matter, not the leftovers of matter/antimatter?
Hydrogen is matter and what we see around us in the leftovers of the original matter/antimatter created at the beginning of the universe. In this case, matter and anti-matter were created roughly equally from energy in the beginning of the universe. It all pretty much annihilated with each other and turned back into energy which formed matter and antimatter again. For some reason, matter had a slight edge, so after the anti-matter turned back into energy there was still matter left over, which caused the next cycle to happen even quicker as the anti-matter was surrounded by more matter. This continued till only matter existed as at those pressures, any anti-matter was eventually annihilated before it could travel very far preventing any substantial amounts being left behind by time the density of the universe had decreased to the point that lone nuclei could travel without interacting with it's opposite. That's why we don't see anti-matter galaxies or planets around.
You can read about it here: Baryogenesis.
With a follow up here: Big Bang Nucleosynthesis.
And by following links at any point that seems confusing you can find even more information. For books, there are some nice ones by Brian Greene that I think address this as well as things like dark matter and the make up of the early universe, but I can't remember which one off the top of my head.
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.
"Sun" is the English name for the Latin name "Sol". Same name, different language.
To double down on what Rei said;
The rest of science *may* only have 10% of the data, but I promise you're not smart enough to know the data is worthless either.
So in the meantime the rest of the community that enjoys exploring new things, forming hypothesis, and experimenting will continue to bring us out of the stone age. As they have for centuries.
Sure they have to make a dollar, and a lot of times they may nudge a decimal point to keep the lights on, but the modern technology we enjoy sure has hell justifies a lot for their discipline.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.