RAS/AMNH: Finding Hints of Gravitational Waves in the Stars

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RAS/AMNH: Finding Hints of Gravitational Waves in the Stars

Post by bystander » Tue Sep 23, 2014 1:55 am

Finding Hints of Gravitational Waves in the Stars
American Museum of Natural History | Royal Astronomical Society | 2014 Sep 22
Scientists have shown how gravitational waves—invisible ripples in the fabric of space and time that propagate through the universe—might be “seen” by looking at the stars. The new model proposes that a star that oscillates at the same frequency as a gravitational wave will absorb energy from that wave and brighten, an overlooked prediction of Einstein’s 1916 theory of general relativity. The study, which was published today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, contradicts previous assumptions about the behaviour of gravitational waves.

“It’s pretty cool that a hundred years after Einstein proposed this theory, we’re still finding hidden gems,” said Barry McKernan, a research associate in the American Museum of Natural History’s Department of Astrophysics, who is also a professor at CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College; a faculty member at CUNY’s Graduate Center; and a Kavli Scholar at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Gravitational waves can be thought of like the sound waves emitted after an earthquake, but the source of the “tremors” in space are energetic events like supernovae (exploding stars), binary neutron stars (pairs of burned-out cores left behind when stars explode), or the mergers of black holes and neutron stars. Although scientists have long known about the existence of gravitational waves, they’ve never made direct observations but are attempting to do so through experiments on the ground and in space. ...

Stars as resonant absorbers of gravitational waves - B. McKernan, K.E.S. Ford, B. Kocsis, Z. Haiman
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