APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

Post a reply


This question is a means of preventing automated form submissions by spambots.
Smilies
:D :) :ssmile: :( :o :shock: :? 8-) :lol2: :x :P :oops: :cry: :evil: :roll: :wink: :!: :?: :idea: :arrow: :| :mrgreen:
View more smilies

BBCode is ON
[img] is ON
[url] is ON
Smilies are ON

Topic review
   

Expand view Topic review: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by Case » Sat Sep 30, 2017 2:47 pm

Chris Peterson wrote:
heehaw wrote:It seems surprising that all the detections so far have seemed so similar. Could something be amiss?
Like what? LIGO has a fairly narrow frequency range over which it detects gravitational waves, and the mergers of these midsized black holes is squarely in the middle of it.
The wavelength of the gravitational waves relates to the mass. The length of the ‘arms’ of the detector determine what wavelengths can be observed. To detect mergers of e.g. supermassive black holes, if those happen frequently enough in a mission time frame, we’d need multiple detectors much larger than the Earth itself. See the ESA-NASA LISA mission (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna). Launch is expected in 2034.

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by neufer » Fri Sep 29, 2017 3:20 pm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KAGRA wrote:
<<The Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA) is a project of the gravitational wave studies group at the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research (ICRR) of the University of Tokyo. KAGRA has two arms, 3 km long, which form a laser interferometric gravitational wave detector. It is built in the Kamioka Observatory near the neutrino physics experiments. The excavation phase of tunnels was completed on 31 March 2014. KAGRA has suffered numerous delays. Early planning had hoped to begin construction in 2005 and observation in 2009 but is now likely to enter operation in 2018. Excess water in the tunnels caused significant delays in 2014 and 2015.

KAGRA will detect chirp waves from binary neutron star coalescence at 240 Mpc away with a signal to noise ratio of 10. The expected number of detectable events in a year is two or three. To achieve the required sensitivity, the existing state of the art techniques as used by LIGO and VIRGO (low-frequency vibration-isolation system, high-power laser system, Fabry-Pérot cavities, resonant side band extraction method, and so on) will be extended with an underground location, cryogenic mirrors, and a suspension point interferometer.>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGO wrote:
<<A third-generation detector at the existing LIGO sites is being planned under the name "LIGO Voyager" to improve the sensitivity by an additional factor of two, and halve the low-frequency cutoff to 10 Hz. Plans call for the glass mirrors and 1064 nm lasers to be replaced by even larger 160 kg silicon test masses, cooled to 123 K (a temperature achievable with liquid nitrogen), and a change to a longer laser wavelength in the 1500–2200 nm range at which silicon is transparent. (Many documents assume a wavelength of 1550 nm, but this is not final.)

A design for a larger facility with longer arms is called "Cosmic Explorer", and would improve on the European Einstein Telescope proposal. This is based on the LIGO Voyager technology, but expanded to an ET-like triangular configuration with 40 km arms.>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Telescope wrote:
<<Einstein Telescope (ET) or Einstein Observatory, is a proposed third-generation ground-based gravitational wave detector, currently under study by some institutions in the European Union. It will be located underground to reduce seismic noise and "gravity gradient noise" caused by nearby moving objects.

The arms will be 10 km long (compared to 4 km for LIGO, and 3 km for Virgo and KAGRA), and like LISA, there will be three arms in an equilateral triangle, with two detectors in each corner.

In order to measure the polarization of incoming gravitational waves and avoid having an orientation to which the detector is insensitive, a minimum of two detectors are required. While this could be done with two 90° interferometers at 45° to each other, the triangular form allows the arms to be shared. The 60° arm angle reduces the interferometer's sensitivity, but that is made up for by the third detector, and the additional redundancy provides a useful cross-check.

Each of the three detectors would be composed of two interferometers, one optimized for operation below 30 Hz and one optimized for operation at higher frequencies.

The low-frequency interferometers (1 to 250 Hz) will use optics cooled to 10 K (−441.7 °F; −263.1 °C), with a beam power of about 18 kW in each arm cavity. The high-frequency ones (10 Hz to 10 kHz) will use room-temperature optics and a much higher recirculating beam power of 3 MW.>>

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by Chris Peterson » Fri Sep 29, 2017 1:41 pm

heehaw wrote:It seems surprising that all the detections so far have seemed so similar. Could something be amiss?
Like what? LIGO has a fairly narrow frequency range over which it detects gravitational waves, and the mergers of these midsized black holes is squarely in the middle of it. And black holes are really very simple things- almost everything about them is distilled down to just a few parameters, which are mostly similar. So we'd expect black hole mergers to be extremely simple, to all happen the same way. And that's what LIGO is showing us.

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by hamilton1 » Fri Sep 29, 2017 11:20 am

quote ...
Thanks for replies, looks like I jumped the gun there.

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by heehaw » Thu Sep 28, 2017 8:42 pm

It seems surprising that all the detections so far have seemed so similar. Could something be amiss?

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by Guest » Thu Sep 28, 2017 6:41 pm

Chris Peterson wrote:
geckzilla wrote:
Chris Peterson wrote: YYMMDD is most certainly not the American dating convention, which would almost always be MMDDYY (whether the month was specified numerically or by name). The system used is standard for scientists everywhere, however, since the ordered field significance allows for logical sorting. (And it is a fairly popular convention outside of science in much of Europe.)
I'm disappointed it isn't YYYYMMDD. APOD is going to have problems starting in 2095, which is but a single human lifetime away. The editors will one day retire. Will they hand over APOD to someone new?
APOD can always end with "DD", but the gravitational wave identifications may have to add "HH" in the not too distant future, as more than a single detection in a day becomes increasingly likely.
They're already (almost) following ISO-8601 for the date order, they can keep following it to add higher resolution. YYYYMMDDThhZ or YYYYMMDDThhmmZ.

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by bystander » Thu Sep 28, 2017 6:34 pm

Ann wrote:
Chris Peterson wrote: YYMMDD is most certainly not the American dating convention, which would almost always be MMDDYY (whether the month was specified numerically or by name).
I know. :roll:
The system used is standard for scientists everywhere, however,

It is???
since the ordered field significance allows for logical sorting.

It does???
(And it is a fairly popular convention outside of science in much of Europe.)
Really????
ISO 8601 - International Standard for Date and Time

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by tomatoherd » Thu Sep 28, 2017 5:59 pm

BobStein-VisiBone wrote:
geckzilla wrote:
Chris Peterson wrote: I just meant that one day resolution is all APOD should ever need, but gravitational wave detections may need finer than that.
I still can't tell if we're joking or not.
Some days I wish there were an APOH.
Some folks would not get anything done.

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by BobStein-VisiBone » Thu Sep 28, 2017 5:49 pm

geckzilla wrote:
Chris Peterson wrote: I just meant that one day resolution is all APOD should ever need, but gravitational wave detections may need finer than that.
I still can't tell if we're joking or not.
Some days I wish there were an APOH.

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by Chris Peterson » Thu Sep 28, 2017 5:48 pm

geckzilla wrote:
Chris Peterson wrote:I just meant that one day resolution is all APOD should ever need, but gravitational wave detections may need finer than that.
I still can't tell if we're joking or not.
No. Just considering that the inadequacy of the gravitational wave nomenclature lies at both ends- a lack of the century on the left, and the lack of an hour on the right.

Looking at similar nomenclature elsewhere in astronomy, I'd guess that a second detection on the same day would get a "b" appended. But the time is a little more elegant, IMO.

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by geckzilla » Thu Sep 28, 2017 5:30 pm

Chris Peterson wrote:
geckzilla wrote:And Chris, you kinda lost me. We can just serialize in the same 24 hour intervals them until APOD is nothing but gravitational wave detections. So what if we end up weeks, months, and eventually years behind the results.
I just meant that one day resolution is all APOD should ever need, but gravitational wave detections may need finer than that.
I still can't tell if we're joking or not.

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by Chris Peterson » Thu Sep 28, 2017 5:29 pm

geckzilla wrote:And Chris, you kinda lost me. We can just serialize in the same 24 hour intervals them until APOD is nothing but gravitational wave detections. So what if we end up weeks, months, and eventually years behind the results.
I just meant that one day resolution is all APOD should ever need, but gravitational wave detections may need finer than that.

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by geckzilla » Thu Sep 28, 2017 4:48 pm

Another very typical way to store a date is by the numbers of seconds which have elapsed since the UNIX epoch, which is at 00:00:00 UTC on January 1st, 1970. Each APOD could easily be indexed like this. Today's would be 1506556800, tomorrow's would be 86400 seconds later at 1506643200, and so on. 170814 is comparatively quite a lot easier for a human to read. Count yourself lucky!

And Chris, you kinda lost me. We can just serialize in the same 24 hour intervals them until APOD is nothing but gravitational wave detections. So what if we end up weeks, months, and eventually years behind the results.

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by BobStein-VisiBone » Thu Sep 28, 2017 4:34 pm

Ann wrote:
Chris Peterson wrote: since the ordered field significance allows for logical sorting.

It does???
Ann
That YYMMDD date code is "monotonic" in the sense that you can compare two codes alphabetically and know which one refers to an earlier time. So "171231" is less than "180101" in the same way that 31-Dec-2017 came before 01-Jan-2018.

Yes, I've seen this coding, and similar ones, used in many places. This is one of those tricks that us software developers foist on humanity to save us work, and because we aren't worshipped like gods enough already.

Incidentally I use a bigger monotonic date code formatted like YYYY.MMDD.HHMM, where 2017.0928.1234 means 12:34pm, 28 September 2017.

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by Ann » Thu Sep 28, 2017 4:03 pm

Chris Peterson wrote: YYMMDD is most certainly not the American dating convention, which would almost always be MMDDYY (whether the month was specified numerically or by name).
I know. :roll:
The system used is standard for scientists everywhere, however,


It is???
since the ordered field significance allows for logical sorting.


It does???
(And it is a fairly popular convention outside of science in much of Europe.)
Really????

Ann

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by BDanielMayfield » Thu Sep 28, 2017 3:37 pm

Chris Peterson wrote:
BDanielMayfield wrote:This merger instantly converted 3 solar masses into gravitational wave energy :!:
I wonder what the effect would be if, rather than being 1.8 billion light years away, it had happened inside the Milky Way, say, 18,000 ly away? Could such an event trigger earthquakes, for example?
I don't think it would be detectable except with sensitive gravitational wave detectors. In any case, such mergers produce gravitational waves with lengths from thousands to tens of thousands of kilometers- much larger than fault systems, so unlikely to interact with them strongly.
So no threat to the Earth from such mergers. Good. But, since the power falls off with the inverse square of the distance the signal would be 10 billion times stronger for a 18 kly event, so wouldn't it at least peg LIGO's meters?

Bruce

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by Chris Peterson » Thu Sep 28, 2017 2:57 pm

geckzilla wrote:
Chris Peterson wrote:
hamilton1 wrote:Using the American dating system to name these events is confusing for us Europeans. When I look at '170814' I think '17th August 2014' as opposed to the intended meaning. Using something like '14Aug2017' would be more appropriate, especially now that a European detector is also involved.
YYMMDD is most certainly not the American dating convention, which would almost always be MMDDYY (whether the month was specified numerically or by name). The system used is standard for scientists everywhere, however, since the ordered field significance allows for logical sorting. (And it is a fairly popular convention outside of science in much of Europe.)
I'm disappointed it isn't YYYYMMDD. APOD is going to have problems starting in 2095, which is but a single human lifetime away. The editors will one day retire. Will they hand over APOD to someone new?
APOD can always end with "DD", but the gravitational wave identifications may have to add "HH" in the not too distant future, as more than a single detection in a day becomes increasingly likely.

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by geckzilla » Thu Sep 28, 2017 2:53 pm

Chris Peterson wrote:
hamilton1 wrote:Using the American dating system to name these events is confusing for us Europeans. When I look at '170814' I think '17th August 2014' as opposed to the intended meaning. Using something like '14Aug2017' would be more appropriate, especially now that a European detector is also involved.
YYMMDD is most certainly not the American dating convention, which would almost always be MMDDYY (whether the month was specified numerically or by name). The system used is standard for scientists everywhere, however, since the ordered field significance allows for logical sorting. (And it is a fairly popular convention outside of science in much of Europe.)
I'm disappointed it isn't YYYYMMDD. APOD is going to have problems starting in 2095, which is but a single human lifetime away. The editors will one day retire. Will they hand over APOD to someone new?

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by Chris Peterson » Thu Sep 28, 2017 2:27 pm

BDanielMayfield wrote:This merger instantly converted 3 solar masses into gravitational wave energy :!:
I wonder what the effect would be if, rather than being 1.8 billion light years away, it had happened inside the Milky Way, say, 18,000 ly away? Could such an event trigger earthquakes, for example?
I don't think it would be detectable except with sensitive gravitational wave detectors. In any case, such mergers produce gravitational waves with lengths from thousands to tens of thousands of kilometers- much larger than fault systems, so unlikely to interact with them strongly.

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by BDanielMayfield » Thu Sep 28, 2017 2:11 pm

This merger instantly converted 3 solar masses into gravitational wave energy :!:
I wonder what the effect would be if, rather than being 1.8 billion light years away, it had happened inside the Milky Way, say, 18,000 ly away? Could such an event trigger earthquakes, for example?

Bruce

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by Chris Peterson » Thu Sep 28, 2017 1:55 pm

hamilton1 wrote:Using the American dating system to name these events is confusing for us Europeans. When I look at '170814' I think '17th August 2014' as opposed to the intended meaning. Using something like '14Aug2017' would be more appropriate, especially now that a European detector is also involved.
YYMMDD is most certainly not the American dating convention, which would almost always be MMDDYY (whether the month was specified numerically or by name). The system used is standard for scientists everywhere, however, since the ordered field significance allows for logical sorting. (And it is a fairly popular convention outside of science in much of Europe.)

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by BDanielMayfield » Thu Sep 28, 2017 1:54 pm

BobStein-VisiBone wrote:How easy it is to be certain and wrong, and how hard that is to fix.
Profoundly true.

Bruce

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by BobStein-VisiBone » Thu Sep 28, 2017 12:19 pm

What a fascinating read, that story Einstein's double reversal, about the changing minds over whether gravitational waves are real or abstract.
...in the end, Einstein had fully accepted the objections that had initially so upset him.
And then Feynman's contribution:
...after the introduction of the bead argument, any remaining doubts soon disappeared from the research literature.
How easy it is to be certain and wrong, and how hard that is to fix.

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by Guest » Thu Sep 28, 2017 12:16 pm

hamilton1 wrote:Using the American dating system to name these events is confusing for us Europeans. When I look at '170814' I think '17th August 2014' as opposed to the intended meaning. Using something like '14Aug2017' would be more appropriate, especially now that a European detector is also involved.
The method chosen is so that observation dates can be easily arranged numerically. Throwing month names in there would make this simple, logical arrangement impossible.

Re: APOD: LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap (2017 Sep 28)

by hamilton1 » Thu Sep 28, 2017 11:52 am

Using the American dating system to name these events is confusing for us Europeans. When I look at '170814' I think '17th August 2014' as opposed to the intended meaning. Using something like '14Aug2017' would be more appropriate, especially now that a European detector is also involved.

Top