Gravity Waves....new announcement imminent....

www.cbc.ca...
Looks like there is breaking news coming from this outfit Thursday
www.ligo.caltech.edu...
Follow the links to the real nitty gritty........
But it looks like G Waves may have been discovered....
G Waves are ripples in the space continuum brought about by massive phenomena like black holes colliding....
Heads up on Thursday folks...

www.cbc.ca...

Whenever researchers do stuff like this, and state it's going to be a much-anticipated announcement, it always makes me think of things that are just absolutely insane that we've discovered, and they're about to release information with so much impact, that life as we know it will change.

And then my hopes and dreams are always shot down, but a great discovery, yes, but always just short of something beyond crazy, like wormholes or what have you.

That all being said, I'm excited for it anyway!

Come on wormholes!!! COME ON WORMHOLES!!!!!

a reply to: Ghost147
The more we understand about gravity, the closer we are to the stars IMHO.....

a reply to: bandersnatch

I completely agree. I just wish they'd stop teasing us and bringing our hopes up for something extravagant.

Getting to the stars is about ending aging not worm holes.

Loving these leaps in science. Keep them coming!

In the article it states "they aren't blocked or scattered by objects the way light is"...

How can they be detected then? Sensors work by "blocking" to enough of a degree that a measurement can be made.

My gut is telling me they'll make a big announcement and then will have to retract it because of some variable they didn't account for caused a promising blip.

originally posted by: gspat
In the article it states "they aren't blocked or scattered by objects the way light is"...

How can they be detected then? Sensors work by "blocking" to enough of a degree that a measurement can be made.

In a nutshell, the gravitational waves shake something a tiny tiny bit as they pass through. The size of the interaction is extremely small and the demands on the experimental precision extraordinarily high. The technology is truly heroic.

It's like catching the breeze from a passing mosquito, two hundred kilometers away.

The idea is that the special disturbance will make a laser wiggle....(hows that for a nutshell?)
Parrallel lasers should be parallel off into infinity....
By 2035 they plan to have 3 satelites a million miles apart.....then I presume shoot a laser between them...if gravity waves are present then they can be measured?
I think....

a reply to: mbkennel

Sounds like they'd have more luck with the mosquito...

So basically... any vibration at all could feasibly throw it off?

From Wikipedia article for "Light":

"Light is electromagnetic radiation within a certain portion of the electromagnetic spectrum."

Would a large enough magnetic field cause them any grief?

Aside from the possibility of a wormhole...
communications should not be ruled out as a means for the creation of them and for what information or signals they could contain...
Sure we problably couldn't understand the message but it could be deemed to be an intelligent signal leading to further discovery and possibly the ability to understand it in time...

according to the article in your link, gravity waves already exists

A newly upgraded, half-billion-dollar instrument is getting ready to create a new picture of the universe by listening for ripples in space caused by gravity waves.

half a billion dollar? wasn't there a crisis.

and again they claim they exists

Advanced LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory, is a huge gravity wave detector that is attempting to investigate and understand how space itself is vibrated and distorted when objects, such as neutron stars and black holes, are jostled in violent collisions and explosions.

and this will give us what? more questions and less understanding? let's first try to find the answers to more fundamental problems in physics.

What a coincidence it's been 100 years...

a reply to: Ghost147

Couldn't agree more with you - and this is across the board with all 'scientific discovery' news'. Remember watching Hawass on the pyramid when a tiny camera got past an obstacle and toddled slowly up a shaft. Hawass wetting himself because…..
further up the shaft was a little door which blocked sight of anything else. We were all supposed to share his excessive excitement - personally I just thought the whole thing was a damp squid because we rarely saw something that took your breath away.

From the article. "Advanced LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory, is a huge gravity wave detector that is attempting to investigate and understand how space itself is vibrated and distorted when objects, such as neutron stars and black holes, are jostled in violent collisions and explosions."

Maybe the ultimate goal is time travel? Distortions in space caused by black holes. Would that not also distort time?

Another article:

www.rt.com...
Aside from Krauss, it sounds like others aren't so sure.

I would read that "Still analyzing data" means "We're not quite sure yet".

If a ripple of gravity passed us, would we ride a "relative" wave of time, slowing as we go up one side and slowing as we surf down it?

Of course we are all too close togther to notice the effect, to us the ripple would warp all the space around us, we would need atomic clocks light years away to realise if a wave had passed us or even if we (our solar system) are 'riding' one right now!

Cool stuff, mind bending as it is time bending....if only we could create a gravity wave behind us constantly, we could surf forwards in time and space! Now thats a fun way to think of it (not that im an expert but considering how many similarity's there are to closer objects) Like the gravitational lensing of disant star light passing just close enough to a black hole to be bend back inward to be detected rather than miss us completely.

I wonder how we will be able to not only be able detect such waves, but exploit them for space or time travel. Veeeery interesting!

originally posted by: gspat
a reply to: mbkennel

Sounds like they'd have more luck with the mosquito...

So basically... any vibration at all could feasibly throw it off?

Yeah, they have extraordinary isolation and signal processing. They use perpendicular arrays to make sure they see the signal in both arms (gravitational waves are quadupole and have a particular orientation) and then correlate any signal with another lab thousands of km away. A real astronomical gravitational wave would excite both of them nearly simultaneously.

Would a large enough magnetic field cause them any grief?

Just about everything could cause them some grief. The detectors (LIGO) have been operating for years, and have been recently upgraded. There is a large physics & engineering base on the technology.

originally posted by: Biigs
If a ripple of gravity passed us, would we ride a "relative" wave of time, slowing as we go up one side and slowing as we surf down it?

Of course we are all too close togther to notice the effect, to us the ripple would warp all the space around us, we would need atomic clocks light years away to realise if a wave had passed us or even if we (our solar system) are 'riding' one right now!

Fairly close, yes. Remember, the magnitude is really tiny and completely otherwise imperceptible. And yes, the experiments do, in effect, use 'atomic clocks'----they use lasers which have to be designed to have a stupendously stable frequency and then they look for tiny oscillations after passing the beam through a long distance. Changes in space & time metric would lead to fluctuations in frequency and phase. Distinguishing the pattern of gravitational waves against all the noise and other spurious signals in the background is the trick. No doubt things like tides, rain, air pressure, earthquakes, traffic, and the like would make much bigger signals, but not of the right form.

if only we could create a gravity wave behind us constantly, we could surf forwards in time and space!

Well, the gravitational wave would propagate through you nearly at the speed of light. I don't know if could transfer any significant amount of momentum but I suspect not.

a reply to: mbkennel

This is not necessarily true...
Take if your inside an anti gravity bubble for instance hypothetically speaking of course...
Then you would indeed be pushed along... just like a boat on water drifting along the waves...

And then you must consider space and gravity are also responsible for time as we know it if they are altered then so would the relative quantified time frame be....

So this also is a good indicator of movement amoungst said gravitational waves also being altered... even without anti gravity... And this would be approaching the theory on wormholes...

originally posted by: gspat
In the article it states "they aren't blocked or scattered by objects the way light is"...

How can they be detected then? Sensors work by "blocking" to enough of a degree that a measurement can be made.

My gut is telling me they'll make a big announcement and then will have to retract it because of some variable they didn't account for caused a promising blip.

Maybe it's a proton acting spooky within a wave.