Re: Cosmic explosion, but no gravitational waves

On Jan 21, 3:43 am, Sam Wormley <sworml...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Peter Webb wrote:

"Sam Wormley" <sworml...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:noDjj.303426$Fc.262494@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cosmic explosion, but no gravitational waves
 http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/32461

  Physicists searching for gravitational waves with the LIGO detector
  in the US have released their first major scientific result. But
  instead of heralding the much-anticipated first direct detection of
  these tiny ripples in space-time, the team announced that
  gravitational waves did not appear to emanate from the source of a
  gamma-ray burst detected last year. The LIGO team has used this
  apparent absence of gravitational waves to gain further insight into
  the origins of the dramatic astrophysical events that produce intense
  bursts of gamma rays.

  "I wish that the first major announcement were a detection of
  gravitational waves, but this is not the primary goal of our
  field," Kip Thorne of Caltech told physicsworld.com. Thorne, who
  is a long-time member of the LIGO team, also said: "As I see it, that
  goal is to open up the gravitational wave window onto the universe so
  that we can explore poorly understood processes. The LIGO
  non-observation is in that spirit."

  Disturbances in space-time

  Gravitational waves are predicted by Einstein\u2019s general theory
  of relativity, in which gravity arises from the curvature of
  space-time. The waves are oscillations of space-time that are
  produced when a mass accelerates. However, despite strong indirect
  evidence for their existence -- in particular from measurements
  of the rate at which neutron stars in binary systems lose energy and
  spiral towards one other (a result that earned Russell Hulse and Joe
  Taylor the 1993 Nobel Prize for Physics) -- there is no direct
  proof. This is partly because their amplitude is so small, with even
  the most violent astrophysical events disturbing space-time by less
  than one part in 10^22.

  LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) is the
  largest of several facilities designed to detect such disturbances.
  It comprises two giant interferometers, one located at Hanford,
  Washington state, and the other at Livingston in Louisiana. By
  bouncing a laser off mirrors located at the ends of two 4::km-long
  arms at right angles to one another, any changes in the relative
  lengths of the arms caused by the passage of a gravity wave would
  produce a characteristic interference pattern.

  Crucially, LIGO's Hanford interferometer was in "science mode" on
  February 1st last year, when several space telescopes registered a
  short burst of gamma rays in the direction of the nearby Andromeda
  galaxy.

  First glimpsed 40 years ago, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are among the
  most energetic and mysterious events in the universe. They come in
  two broad types: "long", lasting between 2::s and a few minutes; and
  "short", lasting from a few milliseconds to 2::s. In 2003 researchers
  successfully traced the former to supernovae, but astrophysicists are
  only beginning to understand the origins of short GRBs.

  Colliding black holes

  The leading candidate for the majority of short GRBs is the merger of
  two ultra-dense objects such as neutron stars or black holes -
  events that should also produce a burst of gravitational waves.
  However, at a conference on GRBs held in Santa Fe last November, the
  LIGO team announced that its interferometers had detected no such
  signature at the time when "GRB070201" went off.

  "We know that coalescing binary have to produce gravitational waves,"
  says Jim Hough of Glasgow University , who is principle investigator
  for the UK of the GEO600 gravitational wave detector based in
  Hannover, Germany. "Therefore, either the source was not a coalescing
  binary or there is some exotic situation where the gravitational
  waves disappear into another dimension. The latter seems unlikely,
  but would be very exciting of course!"

  Other causes for the event, such as a "soft gamma ray repeater" (SGR)
  or a binary merger from much further away, are now the most likely
  contenders. However, Stan Woosley of the University of California at
  Santa Cruz -- who was one of the first to link long-lived GRBs with
  supernovae -- points out that the merger of neutron stars is excluded
  only to the 90% level, which is not as tight as astrophysicists would
  like. " If the event was indeed in Andromeda, it was likely a SGR.
  The likelihood of two neutron stars merging in this nearby galaxy
  while we happen to be watching is perhaps one in a million years ,"
  he says. "However, the result is a technological tour de force which
  illustrates the potential of co-ordinated gravity wave and gamma-ray
  observations."

  The result has recently been accepted for publication in the
  Astrophysical Journal.

Has LIGO found any gravitational waves at all? Or could this be a
billion dollar version of Michelson Morley?

   You should go to the LIGO Pages and read the published results. BTW
   null results are extremely important in science... the Michelson Morley
   was one of many.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Ah, the so -called MMX result which set in motion a trainwreck which
is actually good for astronomy in the long run.

A century ago they were running around talking of how aether/absolute
space was history and a new 'relativistic' revolution had begun.How
many in this forum today would dare associate aether with Newton let
alone 'absolute space'.

The fact is that Newton had very different ideas for absolute/relative
space and it is spectacular when set against the approaches the great
astronomers had to retrogrades as seen from an orbitally moving
Earth.No offense to the mathematicians in the early part of the 20th
century who did their utmost to promote exotic junk,modern imaging
makes it very easy to make inroads into these destructive mutations
which Newton/Flamsteed introduced into heliocentric reasoning.

People are lazy Sam,people are bone lazy which is why nobody bothers
to explore the astronomical frontier.It is a laziness of undeveloped
intuive intelligence hence you will always have an audience for the
exotic nonsense of mathematicians.





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