University of Birmingham, UK | 2020 Oct 01
Gravitational wave scientists looking for evidence of ‘lensing’, in which the faintest gravitational wave signals become amplified, are unlikely to make these detections in the near future according to new analysis by scientists at the University of Birmingham.
Gravitational wave scientists looking for evidence of ‘lensing,’ in which the faintest gravitational wave signals become amplified, are unlikely to make these detections in the near future according to new analysis by scientists at the University of Birmingham.
A team in the University’s School of Physics and Astronomy and the Institute for Gravitational Wave Astronomy has analysed currently available gravitational wave data to predict that these elusive signals are likely to remain undetected by the instruments currently operated by the LIGO and Virgo Collaboration.
The existence of gravitational lensing was predicted by Einstein and is a well-recognised phenomenon in relation to light waves. Light emitted by distant objects in the universe is bent by the gravitational pull of other massive objects, such as galaxies when the light source passes behind them. When detected by the Earth’s telescopes, this distortion might make the light-emitting object seem larger or closer to Earth than it actually is.
Scientists predict that the same will be true of signals from gravitational waves -- but we won’t find them just yet. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, the Birmingham team drew together available information on the sensitivity of the current observatories with another key ingredient -- the as-yet undetected background -- to predict the statistical likelihood of lensing events. ...
Constraining the Lensing of Binary Black Holes from Their Stochastic Background ~ Riccardo Buscicchio et al
- Physical Review Letters 125(14):1102 (02 Oct 2020) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.141102
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:2006.04516 > 08 Jun 2020 (v1), 21 Aug 2020 (v2)