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Gravitational Wave Detectors Upgraded To Hunt For 'Extreme Cosmic Events' (cnet.com)
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) facilities, residing in Washington and Louisiana, will be upgraded via grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, UK Research and Innovation and the Australian Research Council -- providing stronger, more frequent detections and decreasing noise. CNET reports: Over $34 million will be provided for the upgrade which makes LIGO sound like the latest iPhone. When it is complete, LIGO will go from its crusty old 2015 "Advanced LIGO" phase to the "Advanced LIGO Plus" phase. LIGO's twin facilities both contain two 4-kilometer long arms that use lasers to detect minute disturbances caused by extremely energetic cosmic events -- like black holes merging. The incredibly high-powered events are responsible for gravitational waves, rippling out through spacetime the same way water does when you drop a rock in a pond. By the time they reach Earth, the ripples are so small that only incredibly tiny disturbances in LIGO's lasers can detect them.
The proposed upgrades will greatly increase the number of events that LIGO will detect. With only 11 under its belt so far, [David Reitze, executive director of LIGO] even expects we might see "black hole mergers on a daily basis" and describes neutron star mergers becoming "much more frequent." All that extra power adds up, hopefully revealing some of the cosmos' deepest, darkest secrets. In September 2015, LIGO provided the first evidence for a black hole merger -- and in turn, the existence of gravitational waves -- just four days after a three-year long upgrade. Since then, LIGO has seen 10 black hole mergers and a single, huge collision between two incredibly dense stars, known as neutron stars.
The proposed upgrades will greatly increase the number of events that LIGO will detect. With only 11 under its belt so far, [David Reitze, executive director of LIGO] even expects we might see "black hole mergers on a daily basis" and describes neutron star mergers becoming "much more frequent." All that extra power adds up, hopefully revealing some of the cosmos' deepest, darkest secrets. In September 2015, LIGO provided the first evidence for a black hole merger -- and in turn, the existence of gravitational waves -- just four days after a three-year long upgrade. Since then, LIGO has seen 10 black hole mergers and a single, huge collision between two incredibly dense stars, known as neutron stars.
I am also interested in these "extreme cosmic events", but would like to know if there's going to be a cash bar and/or bottle service and any dress code. Last time I went to one of those things I got wasted on K and had the dry mouth and all they had was weird fruit juices and herbal teas.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I find it fascinating that we can view objects exploding and combining billions of miles away because stuff on planet earth changes position.
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Without music, life would be a mistake. - Friedrich Nietzsche
when the next comet splashes into earth, we'll probably notice without the help of a detector.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Actually, we have both. LIGO consists of two interferometers, and it cooperates with other interferometers to provide resolution and direction. A single interferometer couldn't make a difference between a truck driving around, an earthquake and a gravitational event far away. Just because there is a second one 2000 miles away allows to make a difference between a local event and a cosmic event and gives a first glance at direction. And with a third one on another continent, you can also triangulate the direction.
It is great that LIGO will be upgraded and able to detect more events, but that is all that the article says. Can anyone provide a link to a slightly more technical article which explains how it will be upgraded and why these upgrades will make it more sensitive?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Over $34 million will be provided for the upgrade which makes LIGO sound like the latest iPhone.
I know Apple has been putting up their prices but if $34 million sounds like an iPhone upgrade then things have clearly got out of hand.
... and daughter colliding at the local supermarket checkout. :-)
Their masses really qualifies this for being an "extreme cosmic event"
Can you look inwards too? i.e. towards that inner solid earths core?
You can't NOT look inwards. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Thank you for that. I watched this hour long lecture and I can't deny that it was interesting. However, it was produced two years ago and whilst the speaker discusses possible future upgrades in general terms, he covers those which might be applied over the next 20 years. It is not at all clear which are the ones covered by this new funding.
https://www.nature.com/article...
The major technology currently being tuned at advanced LIGO (aLIGO) is "squeezed light" - manipulation of the quantum state of the light, so as to decrease phase uncertainty. Due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, this comes at the cost of increased amplitude uncertainty. The phase uncertainty is an important source of noise at high frequencies (which are more interesting), but the amplitude uncertainty manifests as low frequency noise (due to pressure on the mirrors), so this is a reasonable tradeoff.
The next step being developed for future upgrades(termed aLIGO+), is frequency dependent squeezing - the quadrature of the squeezing (i.e. it's direction in the amplitude/phase plane) can be made to rotate over time. This has the extraordinary effect of squeezing so as to reduce amplitude uncertainty at low frequencies, while reducing phase uncertainty at high frequencies (i.e. improving noise at all frequencies)
http://www.apc.univ-paris7.fr/...
Boy did you not get the memo on how this thing actually works.
LIGO searches for an extremely precise signal known as a "ring down" which is entirely unlike any kind of dump truck doing anything dump trucks do.
The problem is somewhat different: a dump truck plus exactly the right random noise might produce a nun-bun artifact in the shape of a ring down.
So it certainly helps to corroborate detections by having multiple detectors.
Grave doubts over LIGO's discovery of gravitational waves — 31 October 2018
I'm not going to read that article again just now, but as I recall it, the detection algorithm is not detecting objects at the two main LIGO installations independently, so that the detections corroborate each other, but combining both signals into what amounts to a single instrument (basically into a single sigma budget, rather than separate sigma budgets).
Secondly, the search is template-driven, scanning for exactly the kinds of ring-downs they expect (hope) to find.
Between these two things, it's certainly possible into deceiving yourself into thinking you've detected something you haven't detected.
(I haven't followed up on this data analysis challenge recently.)
Finally, the cosmic directionality of the two LIGO machines is terrible. I forget the exact number, but between the two machines, you get something like a giant banana whose length is 20% of the sky.
The Direction of LIGO's Gravitational Waves — 6 March 2016
That provides an introduction, but does not quantify the banana in square degrees that I can see on a quick revisit.
Ideally we would have four machines, and the machines would be partitioned for independent detection. Once the detection is confirmed to the same sigma twice, then all four machines can be combined into a single directional assessment, and then we can get hot onto neutron-star mergers in visible light.
What i always wonder about.... is it just the electric universe idiot cultists who post stupid crap like you just did, or is there some other group of cultist idiots out there that don't know any actual science who keep talking about how everything we know is wrong, despite the civilization we've built on that knowledge?
I mean, because you don't know dick about physics, maybe because the word are too big for you or something... doesn't mean the physics is wrong. It just means you're intentionally stupid.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Einstein did not do away with gravity, just better explained it. Gravity is an observed phenomena, you can't just make an observation disappear. Even without relativity, one of Einstein's thought experiments proved gravity is not a force. Forces can be measured with an accelerometer. Gravity cannot. Use an accelerometer on an object in orbit and no acceleration is measured. If gravity was a force, acceleration would be measured. Not to mention that acceleration takes energy. If an object in orbit was actually accelerating, it would have nearly infinite energy.
Typical Electric Universe crap.