A new way to study our universe': what gravitational waves mean for future science

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: October 4, 2017 at 11:37:53 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] 'A new way to study our universe': what gravitational waves mean for future science
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> 'A new way to study our universe': what gravitational waves mean for future science
> The 2017 physics Nobel prize was awarded for the detection of gravitational waves. But what else could be revealed 
> now that this discovery has been made
> By Ian Sample and Hannah Devlin
> Oct 3 2017
> <https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/03/a-new-way-to-study-our-universe-what-gravitational-waves-mean-for-future-science-nobel-physics>
>
> You wait 100 years for a gravitational wave and then four come along at once. Or so it must seem to those who spent 
> decades designing and building the exquisite instruments needed to sense the minuscule ripples in spacetime that 
> Albert Einstein foresaw in his 1905 theory of general relativity.
>
> The first gravitational wave bagged by physicists reached Earth on 14 September 2015 and sent a quiver through the 
> US-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo). The second hit three months later, on Boxing 
> Day, followed by a third in January this year. When the fourth wave arrived in August, both Ligo and a second 
> observatory in Italy, named Virgo, recorded the moment.
>
> Each of the gravitational waves had been set in motion by violent collisions between black holes more than a billion 
> years ago. But while detecting the waves was feat enough to land the Nobel prize in physics for Rainer Weiss, Barry 
> Barish and Kip Thorne, what excites astronomers now is what they stand to learn about the universe.
>
> “This is a story in two parts,” said Sheila Rowan, director of the Institute for Gravitational Research at the 
> University of Glasgow. “The first part was the quest to make these instruments sensitive enough to make the first 
> detection, but that’s the end of one story and the start of another. We are really on the threshold of a whole new 
> way to study our universe and that’s hugely exciting.”
>
> Until now, astronomers have mapped the heavens almost exclusively with telescopes that gather light and other forms 
> of electromagnetic radiation. Optical telescopes, such as Hubble, have allowed scientists to gaze deep into the 
> history of the universe, but these observations hit a hard limit at about 400,000 years after the big bang: back 
> then, the universe was opaque to light.
>
> Gravitational waves are not so easily blocked. Although they are weak, they are hard to mask, and so future 
> observations of the waves could allow scientists to break through the optical limit and see what the universe looked 
> like moments after the big bang.
>
> “At some point, not with the detectors we have now, we hope to be able to look at the beginnings of the universe,” 
> said Rainer Weiss, the physicist at MIT who shared Tuesday’s Nobel prize in physics with other members of the Ligo 
> team. 
>
> “There are calculations that indicate that the very earliest instants of the universe, right after the universe gets 
> born, there is an enormous amount of background radiation of gravitational waves generated. That would be one of the 
> most fascinating things man could [see] because it will tell you very much how the universe starts.”
>
> The earliest gravitational waves were probably emitted a fraction of a second after the big bang, when the universe 
> went from being smooth and structureless to clumpy, at which point spacetime became “bendy”. 
>
> Professor Andreas Freise, a Ligo project scientist at the University of Birmingham, said: “One of the mysteries is 
> how we get from there to now where everything is clumpy.”
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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