An Ephemeral Whisper in the Cosmic Dark

by Shane L. Larson

In a 2012 article in Esquire, the inimitable American magician Teller noted, “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” 

This past week, the world was greeted with the news that a worldwide collaboration of scientists, in a multiple collaborations, made a magical announcement: they have detected a faint gravitational hum coming from the Cosmos, created by pairs of super-massive black holes, strewn across the Universe, dancing around each other in slow, languorous orbits that shed gravitational waves. 

An artistic interpretation of an array of pulsars immersed in gravitational waves from a distant supermassive black hole binary. [Image: Aurore Simonnet/NANOGrav Collaboration]

Like most newsflashes from the frontiers of science, the announcement is a magical moment, instilling deep wonder and inspiring an endless barrage of questions about what it means, how was it found, what does it tell us about other mysteries of the Cosmos, and why does it matter to us down here on Earth? The magic and the wonderment stem from the bigger than life nature of the discovery, far removed from the trials and tribulations of day-to-day existence on Earth — a reminder that we are part of something far larger than ourselves. But for the scientists around the world who made the discovery, it’s what Teller said: the discovery is the culmination of decades of work, the result of spending more time on this particular mystery of the Cosmos than anyone else.

Let me tell you three things about this remarkable achievement.

[1] What is a “nanohertz gravitational wave background”?

This tale begins with the idea that nothing in the Universe has to only be found leading solitary monastic lives, drifting along in the vast void. Very often, objects can find each other (or are born together) through their mutual gravitational attraction — this includes, stars, planets, asteroids, galaxies, and as it turns out, black holes.

We know from long, detailed studies of the sky with telescopes two remarkable things.

Two decades of observations have shown the orbits of stars around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Observations like these earned Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel their share of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics. [NCSA/UCLA/Keck]

First, we know that most galaxies have at their hearts a massive black hole, millions or billions of times more massive than a single star. If you are a science fan, you’ve heard a lot about this recently, from the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics awarded for precise measurements of the enormous black hole at the center of the Milky Way. You have likely also heard of a remarkable picture taken by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, showing the silhouette of a massive black hole in the galaxy M87, an inky void against the glowing light of the gas that surrounds and feeds it.

The first picture of the black hole at the heart of M87, formed by light being bent around the inner most regions of space outside the black hole. [Image: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration]

Second, we know that galaxies collide. One of the most spectacular examples of this are a pair of galaxies known as “The Mice,” slowly tearing one another apart as they merge over the course of a billion years. Another example is a remarkable ring galaxy known as Hoag’s Object, the result of a small galaxy dropping through the heart of a larger companion and leaving a beautiful geometry in place, like the spreading ring from a stone dropped in a pond.

Examples of the consequences of galaxy collisions. (left) A pair of galaxies mid-collision, known as “The Mice”. (right) A ring galaxy known as Hoag’s Object. [Both Images: Hubble/STScI/AURA]

These two bits of knowledge  leads to a lovely question: what happens to the massive black holes in a galaxy when two galaxies merge and combine? The expectation has long been that the black holes would slowly sink to the center of the new combined galaxy, eventually find one another, and merge to become a newer, bigger black hole. That process of finding one another and slowly spiraling together to become one takes a long time.

When the black holes do find one another, they dance around in an orbit, not unlike the orbits of the Moon around the Earth. Long before the black holes make their final crash, those orbits are large and can take many decades to complete. During this time, as they warily spiral around one another, they are constantly changing the parts of the Universe they are bending with their gravity, and that change ripples out through the Cosmos as “gravitational-waves.”

As massive objects orbit one another and get closer and closer together, they emit gravitational waves in all directions. [Image: S. Larson]

Sitting where you and I are sitting in the Cosmos, the gravitational-waves from any one of these black holes will wash through our galaxy, but only one complete wave from the black holes will pass over the course of many years. There are about a billion seconds of time that elapse every 30-ish years; if a complete gravitational wave takes 30 years to pass by, then each second means one-one-billionth of a gravitational wave passes by. Scientists abbreviate the amount of “one-one-billionth” with the word “nano-” which comes from ancient Greek meaning “very small.” Nanohertz gravitational waves are waves so large it takes several decades for them to pass by.

Which brings us to the last word, “background.” This is a bit of scientific jargon, but it describes a phenomena that most of us are likely familiar with. Consider the last time you were out shopping, or at a high-school basketball game, or in a crowded restaurant. Immersed in a crowd of hundreds of people all carrying on conversations and laughing, you were immersed in a cacophony of sound. You could certainly hear the person next to you (with whom you were probably discussing the discovery of the nanohertz gravitational-wave background), but all the other conversations are overlapping and blended into the “background.” The gravitational-wave background is the same way — there are so many pairs of massive black holes strewn across the Cosmos, all of them shedding gravitational waves, that the cacophony of them merges to form a faint hum of indistinguishable signals.

From dark sites far from cities, you can see the Milky Way in the night sky overhead, as in this image over the Pando Forest in Utah. [Image: Shane L. Larson]

This idea of overlapping indistinguishable signals becoming a faint, detectable signature of the Universe is not unknown in astronomy. If you have ever had the good fortune to go camping, far from the glaring lights of our cities, and looked up to see the vast tapestry of the sky over you, you’ve likely seen the river of the Milky Way, arching overhead from one side of the sky to the other. A faint, gossamer glow of light that when you first see it may have reminded you of clouds or fog. But it is no such thing — the Milky Way is the combination of the light of a hundred billion stars in our home galaxy, each too faint to see individually, but together they make a faint light your eye can detect. The gravitational wave background is the same idea, just with gravitational waves instead of light.

[2] How was the nanohertz background detected?

You may have heard of gravitational-wave observatories before (LIGO, and LISA), but this new discovery was made with a remarkable technique known as pulsar timing, where we mesh our own modern technology with natural phenomena from Nature to create a galaxy-spanning gravitational-wave antenna array.

Artist’s rendering of a pulsar – a rapidly rotating neutron star that emits a beam of radio light that passes the Earth once every rotation. This results in a detectable pulse from the star, hence the term pulsar. [Image: Olena Shmahalo/NANOgrav]

It begins with dead stars — stellar skeletons of a particular type called a pulsar. Certain stars, when they reach the end of their lives, explode and leave behind a cinder of their former selves, roughly the size of a city (about 20 kilometers across), but containing the mass of about one-and-a-half times that of our own Sun. Like most things in Nature, these stellar skeletons are rotating. What makes a pulsar “pulse” is it has a very bright beam of radio light it is spewing out of a point on its surface — as it spins, it sweeps that radio beam across the sky, and everyone in the right place sees a bright pulse as the beam goes by, and then nothing, and then a bright pulse, and then nothing — a cosmic lighthouse jetting its signal across the Universe.

Astronomers create pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) by using radio telescopes on Earth to monitor a large collection of pulsars every now and then for decades. Today, there are several such collaborative enterprises on Earth: NANOgrav  in North America, the European PTA in Europe, the Indian PTA in India, the Parkes PTA in Australia, and an overarching global collaboration called the International PTA. Each of these collaborations watches their set of pulsars, and records with exquisite precision what time each of the pulses arrives at Earth.

Because each of the pulsars lived their own lives, in their own little corner of the galaxy, we expect there to be nothing about any of the pulsars that is related between them — in the absence of anything going on, each their signals arrive at Earth at a predicted time defined by the pulsar and where it is relative to Earth. Nothing is correlated (in the literal sense of the word) between the pulsar signals.

An artist’s impression of a pulsar timing array, immersed in a sea of gravitational waves from supermassive black hole binaries outside the galaxy. [Image: Shanika Galaudage]

However, if you are timing many different pulsars, and a gravitational-wave passes through the galaxy, then a subtle pattern emerges. When a gravitational-wave passes between you and a pulsar, it stretches the distance and then it compresses the distance as the wave passes by. When the distance stretches, it takes longer for the pulsar signal to travel to Earth, and in your timing the pulses seem to arrive late. When the distance compresses, it takes less time for the pulsar signal to arrive at Earth, and in your timing the pulses seem to arrive early. But the magic is this: the gravitational-waves are passing through the Milky Way, and changing the spacetime between us and every single pulsar being timed! That means before, where nothing was expected, there is now a unique and detectable correlation between all the pulsars in the timing array!

Summary graphs of the results from NANOgrav. The curve shows the correlations between pulsars in the array due to gravitational waves. (left) The red dashed line is how “uncorrelated data” from pulsars looks. The blue curve is the expected relation between pulsars when gravitational-waves pass by, known as a “Hellings-Downs curve.” (right) The same curve, with NANOgrav’s data overlaid. [Image: NANOgrav]

How long does it take for all these changes to happen and be noticed? The time it takes the gravitational wave to pass, which for the super-massive black holes can be many, many years. Which is why it has taken so long for astronomers to diligently time and retime all the pulsars in the array, and extract the ephemeral signal of the gravitational-wave background from the data.

[3] It’s really about people.

Science is often a long game, particularly science that probes the limits of human knowledge, and science done with advanced technology and tools that can’t fit in your pocket or on a laboratory bench. It takes hundreds and thousands of minds to conceive of what is possible, and then unflagging tenacity to solve each of the problems that arises until — in the end — a remarkable discovery is made. That long and arduous process means that people come and go, as they follow their own winding pathways to careers and life. But it also means we lose some people along the way who pass on, returning to the stardust from which we came. Here, I’d like to draw attention to just two of those people.

The first person was Ron Hellings. Ron is the Hellings of the “Hellings-Downs” curve, the swooping pattern of correlated signals from the scattered beacons in the pulsar timing array. He and his collaborator, George Downs, first wrote down what that pattern would look like and what pulsar astronomers should look for in a paper in 1983; it was only this week in 2023, forty years later, that their idea came to fruition.

Me and Ron Hellings in 2012, working on the details of a gravitational-wave observatory. [Image: S. Larson]

Sadly Ron passed away on 1 January 2022. At his memorial, when we talked about the important things Ron had discovered about the Universe, the Hellings-Downs curve was one of them.

I have the good fortune of being one of Ron’s academic descendants. I first met him when I was working on my PhD thesis, where we were thinking about the LISA gravitational-wave observatory. It was the beginning of a collaborative enterprise and a friendship that spanned a quarter of a century. We worked on many things together, including LISA, how to think about gravitational-wave signals, how to teach students, and a zillion other things in physics and astronomy. After I finished my PhD I spent two years as his postdoc, when he was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It was an exhilarating and exciting time, and firmly set me on the path of my career today.

The second person was Steve Detweiler. By the time I was in graduate school, in the late 1990s, Steve was already famous in our community. Like most of those famous people, he was larger than life to us students, but he was always friendly. At meetings, he talked with us at coffee breaks, came to our talks, and sometimes went to dinner with us. I knew Steve for many years after we first met, and we would talk at conferences and meetings where our work on gravitational-waves overlapped.

Steve Detweiler. [Image: Eric Poisson]

Steve was well known for many things in his career, but in the late 1970s he was the first person to propose that pulsar timing could be used to search for gravitational-wave backgrounds; in no uncertain terms, his original analysis sent us down pathway to the discovery that was announced this week. 

Steve sadly passed away on 8 February 2016, just three days before the first announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves, and seven years before this week’s announcement of the confirmation of his idea for how to sense the Cosmos anew.

For me, Steve was more than a scientific acquaintance. There came a time when I had to prepare my dossier for tenure as a University professor. The process involves a robust independent evaluation of a person’s contribution to the scientific enterprise. For part of it, the University asks several experts from around the world to make a blunt assessment about the tenure dossier. I got to pick two people, and the University picked four; needless to say it is a terrifying prospect, especially for those of us who don’t have the global stature many of our colleagues have in the field. But I asked Steve to write one of my assessments, and he agreed. I have no idea what he said (his letter was confidential), but whatever it was, the University tenured me, and I owe Steve a great thanks. 

My stories and relationships with these senior scientists in the field are not unique — all of us have been encouraged, mentored, and brought into the great adventure of science by colleagues like Ron and Steve. At the NANOgrav press conference, our colleague Maura McLaughlin pointed out that the NANOgrav collaboration involved hundreds of graduate students, undergraduates, and even high school students. Every one of these contributed their time, their unique enthusiasm and energy, and their skills to making the discovery happen. 

Not everyone, but some of the members of the NANOgrav collaboration at a recent meeting. People make science happen. [Image: NANOgrav]

The scientific work kept them in the game, growing their skills and propelling them on to whatever is next in their personal journeys. Some of them will go on and become pulsar-timing gravitational-wave astronomers, to be sure. Some will not, but will still become astronomers or physics professors and mentor students of their own. But not all of them — a good many of them will become teachers, or doctors, or engineers, or business leaders, or accountants, or any of a thousand other careers that make the world go round. And in them all, some of what they learned as part of the pulsar-timing-array community will go along with them.

In the end, it’s all about people, and that is the true legacy — the true magic — of the wondrous discovery of the nanohertz gravitational-wave background.

My heartfelt congratulations, respect, and admiration goes out to all my friends and colleagues who made this discovery possible. Excelsior!

A Cosmic Collection

by Shane L. Larson

The Cosmos wheels above our heads, far out of reach but well within our powers of perception. Always we wonder, what’s happening now and what does it mean? [Image: S. Larson]

The Cosmos is vast beyond ordinary comprehension, and it is always up to something. Astronomy is our most valiant attempt to observe everywhere all at once, to discover all that is discoverable, to know all that is knowable. We are exceptionally good at it, by any standard you can imagine. The store of cosmic knowledge we have amassed just since recorded human history began (only a few millennia) is extraordinary, and has helped push mathematics, physics, and technology forward in dramatic and unexpected ways. In just the last century and a half, technology has expanded our capabilities by leaps and bounds, allowing us to collect exquisite data that is perplexing and mysterious and revealing. Today we live in an era where we can collect so much data, and collect such complex data, that it cannot be absorbed, analyzed, nor understood with only brief consideration. It requires long and sustained study, intense scrutiny, and expansive modeling.

[L to R] Hubble Space Telescope, the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider, and LIGO-Livingston. Exquisite technology expands our ability to observe the Universe around us.

Modern science, particularly at the frontiers of knowledge, requires a lot of human brains to make great discoveries. It begins with the great machines themselves. Building something like the Hubble Space Telescope, or the Large Hadron Collider, or LIGO and Virgo requires vast teams of engineers, physicists, materials scientists, construction engineers, titanium welders, chemists, geologists, and a thousand other professions just to build the experiments. Once we start collecting data, there are thousands of others in physics, computer science, signal processing, image analysis, information technology, visualization, and a thousand other professions needed to understand the data!

Big discoveries emerge almost immediately, because the Universe is always up to something, and always up to something that is dramatic and stunning to behold. If you build an exquisite experiment, you’re going to discover something. Such was the case of Hubble’s discovery of the existence of other galaxies, when we constructed the 100-inch Hooker Telescope on Mount Wilson. Such was the case of Rosalind Franklin’s discovery of double-helix structure of DNA with the development of x-ray crystallography. Such was the case of the discovery of the Higgs Boson with the construction of the Large Hadron Collider. Such was the case with LIGO and Virgo, which over the past three years have witnessed six different gravitational wave events.

My personal accounting of every known gravitational wave event, accurate and complete up through GW170817. When we announced GW170608, my page was too narrow to include it!

Today, the LIGO-Virgo Scientific Collaboration announced our first catalog of gravitational wave events — GWTC-1 (Gravitational Wave Transient Catalog). It is the current complete list of every event we’ve discovered in our data. Some of them you know about, because we have talked about them before (even here on this blog: GW150914, GW151226, GW170104, GW170814, GW170817). But since then, we’ve been sifting through the data, looking at every feature, comparing it to our astrophysical predictions, cross-checking it against monitors that tell us the health of the instruments, determining if it appears in all the detectors, and using our most robust (but slow-running) super-computer analysis codes. 

The result is the catalog before you (if you’re curious, you can see the catalog at the Gravitational-wave Open Science Center), that has improved values for the properties of all the previously announced sources, and four new binary black hole sources that were in the data: GW170729, GW170809, GW170818, and GW170823. Additionally a source previously known as LVT151012 (“LIGO-Virgo Trigger“) has been renamed GW151012.

A screen cap of GWTC-1, the first “Gravitational Wave Transient Catalog of Compact Binary Mergers” as it appeared today. The number of events, the amount of data about what the Cosmos is doing, is growing. [Image: LIGO-Virgo Collaboration]

Astronomers are collectors. Every event has an identity, and a long list of everything that we know about it, but there are always going to be a few that are well known and remembered above all the others. GW150914 is always going to be “The First.” GW151226 (“Boxing Day“) was the second and will always represent the moment we all realized this endeavour really was going to be astronomy, not just a single one-time experiment. GW170817 is always going to be remembered as the first multi-messenger gravitational wave detection of a binary neutron star.

But today when you look at the long list of events it strikes me, for the first time, that this is a huge and ever-growing collection. We’ve always known that would be the case, but there is something viscerally pleasing about watching it happen right before your eyes. It is clear that the list is now long enough that it would be challenging to memorize!

We don’t have images of the gravitational wave events, but our artists can imagine what the members of our collection might have looked like at the moment we observed them. [Images: Aurore Simonnet/LIGO-Virgo Collaboration/Sonoma State University]

From the perspective of astronomy, this is a good thing. Having a collection of events is how we learn things about the Universe that can’t be learned from just a few observations. Let’s examine an analogy to explain the necessity of collections. Suppose you were an extraterrestrial visitor who landed on Earth to learn about “humans” and visited someone’s book-club, perhaps five people. What could be learned by just observing five people? A few obvious things might pop out immediately. Humans have five projections from their bodies (two arms, two legs, a head). They have two eyes and two ears. But depending on the five people you may not learn that there is a wide range of hair or eye colors (any redheads in your reading group? anyone with grey hair? what about blue or green eyes?). You may or may not know that there are multiple sexes, nor that there are smaller and larger humans.  Your knowledge would be completely defined by the size of your collected observations.

This is absolutely the case in astronomy — sometimes we have many observations, sometimes we have only a few, but we always want more. Having many observations is paramount to understanding the Cosmos because observations are the only things we have. We are confined to observing the Universe from this small world on which we live, and what we know is built completely on our few, meager observations.

What stands out the most in the new LIGO catalog? We are still letting the implications settle in, but the most important thing the new events do is it makes our estimate of the popuatlion of black holes in the Universe more accurate, and we’ve started to examine those implications is a new study that is being released in tandem with this announcement. But let me highlight the things that personally catch my attention the most.

This shows all the known masses of black holes and neutron stars, detected both by traditional telescopes and using gravitational waves. I’ve highlighted the new black holes in the catalog in green. You can explore this plot with an interactive we’ve created at CIERA. [Image: LIGO-Virgo/Frank Elavsky/Northwestern]

First, remember that every gravitational-wave detection by LIGO-Virgo is not just one black hole, but three — the two black holes that came together, and the black hole that resulted from their merger. That is very important because it means we have three new measurements of the possible masses that black holes can have. If you look at our black hole mass plot you see that black holes come in all masses between five solar masses and 80 solar masses. In fact the new event, GW170729, produced the heaviest stellar origin black hole known to humans, at 80.3 times the mass of the Sun!

Second, it is interesting to look at the black holes that merged and consider how they are different from one another. From the existent data, it looks like the black holes that merge are always close to the same mass. So far, we’ve never seen a smaller black hole fall into another black hole that is five or ten times larger. Does that mean it never happens in Nature? Or does it mean it happens rarely? Or does it mean we’re not good at seeing or recognizing such events yet? The answer is an important one because the sizes of the black holes before they merge tells us something about how they form and grow together. That question is of intense interest to astronomers since black hole formation is tied to stellar evolution, and stellar evolution is tied to how all the stuff around us is made.

Lastly, the trend continues to show that LIGO and Virgo are sensitive to heavier black holes than those that have been previously known from traditional telescopes. The dramatic demonstration that there are stellar-origin black holes near 100-solar masses is stimulating dramatic conversations among astronomers (particularly theoretical astronomers like my group, who study stellar evolution) about how the Cosmos creates these large black holes. 

Left to Right: LIGO-Hanford (Hanford, Washington), LIGO-Livingston (Livingston, Louisiana), and Virgo (Pisa, Italy). All three detectors are currently working toward the start of our new observing run (“O3”) in the Spring of 2019. When new data begins to flow, the catalog is going to start growing once again.

Perhaps the most exciting thing to me, is this is just the beginning. LIGO and Virgo are currently in a maintenance phase, but our third observing run (“O3”) will begin in the spring of 2019. The instruments will be performing at higher precision than ever before, and there are going to be more detections that will make this catalog grow even larger. Our questions are swirling, the anticipation is palpable. But even more importantly, there is a dedicated group of scientists, particularly those who work in signal analysis, computer science, and machine learning, who are developing new and improved techniques for finding signals in data. There are great practical applications to such endeavours (like how do you separate the 25 zillion text messages sent by teenagers every five minutes), but it will once again help grow our gravitational wave catalog, expanding our understanding of the stellar graveyard of the Universe.

Once new data is being collected, the data from our previous observing runs will sit there in the open data archives, waiting for someone to come back and look at it again. Historically, there have always been discoveries made in archived astronomical data long after it was collected. Data is simply too complex to understand everything in it, and we are simply too naive about everything that is going on in the Universe to recognize everything in our data the first time we work with it. There is certainly more in the LIGO-Virgo data than even this catalog. But progress is slow, and only the future will show us what is yet to be discovered, in an every growing tree of knowledge, dividing and growing from our previous discoveries.

Examples of Lichtenberg figures, created by electrical discharges and discovered by the father of experimental physics, Georg Christoph LIchtenberg. Knowledge, like these figures, branch and grow continuously from each other. [Images: Wikimedia Commons]

One of the great physicists of the 16th Century was Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, widely recognized as the first great designer and builder of experiments in physics, our distant ancestor in this game. Today he is most well known for an artform known as “Lichtenberg figures”, the branching shapes burned in materials by surges in electricity — a most suitable metaphor for our growing branches of knowledge. Lichtenberg fully understood the staggering and surging process of scientific discovery, writing “Nothing puts a greater obstacle in the way of the progress of knowledge than thinking that one knows what one does not yet know.” Today’s announcement is just the beginning of what we do not know.

So today, please join us in basking in the glow of new discovery, reveling in the joy that this is just the beginning, and there is no end. Congratulations to my colleagues and friends in LIGO and Virgo; we’ll do this again sometime soon!

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Several of my colleagues in LIGO and Virgo have also written about the new catalog — please check out their posts as well!

• Christopher Berry — The O2 Catalogue – It goes up to 11
• Mark Hannam — Digging in the Stellar Graveyard

Songs from the Stellar Graveyard (GW170817)

by Shane L. Larson

Bernie Capax meets Death in Brief Lives, by Neil Gaiman.

In Neil Gaiman’s transcendent literary comics series The Sandman,  the Endless are echoes of the patterns of force and existence that define the Universe. Among them is Death, who at the end of our lives, collects us and escorts us from this Universe. As she says to Bernie Capax, who had walked the world for some 15,000 years, “You lived what anybody gets… you got a lifetime.”  (issue 43, contained in the collection “Brief Lives“).

If there is any truth in astronomy that we have learned over the last few centuries, it is that the Universe itself evolves. The stars are born, they live their long lives, and ultimately they perish and decay away. Death waits for them too. The galaxy is littered with the remains of stars that once were. From our vantage point here on Earth, we peer out into the Cosmos and glean what we can with the meager view we have in our telescopes. We have mapped billions of stars, and millions of galaxies. But in the stellar graveyard, we have only seen a handful of objects — we know precious little about the skeletons of the stars, because they simply don’t emit much light.

On 17 August 2017, at 7:41:04 am CDT, a faint whisper from the stellar graveyard washed across the shores of Earth. It showed up first in the LIGO-Virgo gravitational wave network, which was deep in our second observing run (what we call “O2”). At that particular moment, we were all wound up and celebrating because just three days before, we had made our first joint detection with LIGO and Virgo together (a pair of black holes called GW170814). When signals register in our network, the automated software (we call them “pipelines“) generates initial numbers about what the source might be, and that morning we knew we had something special. Our group lead at Northwestern was spinning us all up to start doing computer simulations, and in an early email to us she said what we all knew: this is life changing.

On the first day, we were sending emails that had the inkling already of how important this discovery was.

Why? Because the mass of the objects in the new signal were smaller than anything we had seen in gravitational waves before — all together less than about 3 times the mass of the Sun. Our predisposition from all our years of experience in astronomy said that could mean only one thing: the LIGO-Virgo network had just detected the first binary neutron star merger in history. Today, we call this event GW170817.

Spectrograms show how the frequency of the signal (vertical axis) changes in time (horizontal axis) in each of the three detectors. The long swoop up and to the right is called a chirp. [Image: LIGO-Virgo]

But the story gets better. 1.7 seconds after the gravitational wave signature, the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM), in orbit high over the Earth, registered an event — a short gamma-ray burst, now called GRB170817A. This was hugely significant, because we have often speculated about what causes gamma-ray bursts. For short gamma-ray bursts we’ve long thought it must be colliding neutron stars.

The discovery of GRB170817A by Fermi-GBM. [Image: NASA/Fermi]

What are these neutron stars? They are the dead skeletons of stars, one possible outcome of a colossal stellar explosion known as a supernova. They are extreme objects. They have about one and a half times the mass of the Sun packed inside a sphere about 20 kilometers across (about the size of a city). That means they are extraordinarily dense — a tablespoon of neutron star matter would weigh 1 trillion kilograms — about 3 times the mass of all the humans on planet Earth. Gravity on the surface is outrageously strong — about 190 billion times the strength of gravity on the surface of the Earth; if you had the misfortune of falling off a 1 millimeter high cliff, you would be travelling almost 220,000 kilometers per hour when you hit bottom (136,000 mph).

A neutron star (diameter 20 km) scaled to the Chicago skyline. [Image: LIGO-Virgo/Daniel Schwen/Northwestern]

One thing we know about the lives of the stars is that many of them live together with a partner, orbiting one another in a fashion similar to the Earth orbiting the Sun. Like human life partners, one star inevitably reaches the end of its life first, and expires in a supernova. Some such stars become neutron stars. Eventually, the second star in the pair also dies, and if it supernovas, then one end state is two neutron stars, left in an orbital dance with the skeleton of their partner. One might think that is the end of the story for such stars, but there is still one final chapter in this tale from the stellar graveyard. The orbit of the two neutron stars can and will shrink over time through emission of gravitational waves. Of course, we’ve detected gravitational waves before (GW150914, GW151226, GW170104, GW170814), but this time it’s different. Why? We’re talking about neutron stars instead of black holes, which means there can be light, and indeed there was.

The collision of the neutron stars smashes all the matter together, and under such energetic circumstances, matter generates light. The gamma-ray burst was only the beginning. The collision sheds matter into a volume around the merging pair. This matter, suddenly free of the strong nuclear forces involved in the dense matter of the neutron star, recombines and makes heavy elements (physicists call this “r-process nucleosynthesis“). This recombination also creates light, and is called a kilonova. Following the gamma-ray burst there is also a long term afterglow, from the energetic jet of the gamma-ray burst blasting through the surrounding interstellar medium.

Different phases of emission of electromagnetic radiation from the binary neutron star merger. (L) The initial gamma ray burst. (C) The kilonova from nucleosynthesis. (R) Long term afterglow from energized material around the event. [Images: NASA-GSFC SVS]

The LIGO error ellipses plotted on a skymap of the Hydra-Virgo region. The galaxy NGC 4993 is visible in amateur telescopes. [Image: S. Larson]

Together, the LIGO and Virgo detectors can determine where on the sky a source comes from, though not perfectly. They can point to a region called the gravitational-wave error ellipse. For Gw170817, the ellipse on the sky was narrowed down to just about 30 square degrees — an area about the size and shape of a small banana held out at arms length. The error ellipse spans the boundary between the constellations Hydra and Virgo, with a little tail that stretches into Corvus. This was a difficult position in the sky because at the time of the discovery in mid-August, it sets very shortly after sunset. Never-the-less, telescopes around the world began an intensive imaging search, and just 10.9 hours after the detection of GW170817 and GRB170817A, an optical signal was discovered by the Swope telescope in Chile — a pinpoint of light on the outer fringes of the galaxy NGC 4993 that was not there before. Over the course of the next 10 days, the kilonova faded away; in the end more than 70 observatories worldwide imaged and measured the kilonova.  It has been a historic discovery and observing campaign. This is the beginning of multi-messenger astronomy with gravitational waves.

An image of the kilonova associated with GW170817; the fuzzy blog is NGC 4993. [Image: TOROS Collaboration, M. Diaz]

So what can you do with gravity and light together? As it turns out, an awesome amount of science! Today there is a virtual raft of papers being published (the first wave of many, I expect) outlining what we have learned so far. There are too many to explain them all here, but let me just outline a few that stand out to me.

Probably the most important outcome is the confirmation of the connection between short gamma-ray bursts and binary neutron star mergers. Gamma-ray bursts have been a mystery for more than 40 years. First discovered in the 1960s by the military using satellites meant to monitor nuclear weapon tests, the discovery that they were of cosmic origin was revealed to the scientific community in the 1970s. Since then many ideas and models to explain their origin and intense energy have been explored, but none have been confirmed because the engines — the astrophysical systems that drive them — are far too tiny to resolve in telescopes. The LIGO-Virgo detection of gravitational waves confirms that neutron star binaries are the progenitor of short gamma-ray bursts.

The result that I’m most excited about is we used GW170817 to measure the expansion of the Universe. The expansion of the Universe was first noted by Hubble in 1929, by measuring the distances to other galaxies. This was being done just 5 years after the discovery that there were other galaxies! Fast forward 88 years to 2017 — we’ve measured the expansion of the Universe independently using the distance to a galaxy with gravitational waves and light from telescopic observations together. This measurement comes just two years after the discovery of gravitational waves!  It gives me no small amount of pleasure to echo that historic discovery so close to the beginning of this new era of astronomy. 🙂

Top shows Hubble’s original 1929 diagram (from PNAS, 168, 73[1929]); bottom shows the location on this diagram of the GW170817 measurements, at the + mark. [Image: W. Farr/LIGO-Virgo]

We try and write public accessible versions of our papers in the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration. If you’d like to explore some of the science we’ve been doing, try out some of our science summaries.

There are of course many things we still don’t know about the discovery. Foremost among them is this: what is the thing that formed after the merger of the two neutron stars? Some of us in the astrophysics community think it might be some kind of exotic super-neutron-star, larger than any neutron star ever detected. Some of us in the astrophysics community think it  might be some kind of exotic light-black-hole, smaller than any black hole ever detected. Whatever it is, it lies within a very fuzzy range of masses that we call the mass gap — a range of masses where we have never seen any stellar remnant. What is the lightest black hole Nature can create in the Universe?  What is the heaviest neutron star Nature allows? These are questions we would very much like to know the answer to. At least for the moment, it seems we may not learn the answer from GW170817, but with future detections of binary neutron star mergers we may.

The masses of known stellar remnants discovered by both electromagnetic and gravitational wave observations. Between the black holes and the neutron stars is the “mass gap.” [Image: LIGO-Virgo/Frank Elavsky/Northwestern]

So here we are. We are all simultaneously exhilarated, relieved, joyous, and eager for more discoveries to be made. We’re very tired from late nights analyzing data, arguing about results, writing papers, and furiously preparing ways to tell our story to the world.

We could all use a nap. And a pizza.

Because this is only the beginning, the culmination of decades of hard work, difficult hardships, and anticipation. And the best is yet to come. I’m so happy that I’ve seen these days. Being tired doesn’t bother me, all the struggles getting to this point don’t bother me either, because I got to watch it unfold. As Death said, we get what anyone gets; we get a lifetime. These are the moments, the discoveries, that are filling that lifetime up.  Onward to the next one.

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This post is the latest in a long series that I’ve written about all the LIGO detections up to now.  You can read those previous posts here:

The Harmonies of Spacetime – GW150914

My Brain is Melting – GW150914 (part 2)

The Cosmic Classroom on Boxing Day (GW151226)

New Astronomy at the New Year (GW170104)

Focusing our Gravitational Wave Attention (GW170814)

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I have many LIGO and Virgo colleagues who also blog about these kinds of things. You may enjoy some of their posts too!

• Amber Stuver (Villanova): First Observation of a Neutron Star with Gravitational Waves and Light!
• Jocelyn Read (Fullerton): The gravitational-wave story of a neutron-star merger
• Martin Hendry (Glasgow): How we discovered gravitational waves from ‘neutron stars’ – and why it’s such a huge deal
• Mark Hannam (Cardiff): Kaboom! Two kinds of astronomy collide, and produce a burst of science
• Christopher Berry (Birmingham): GW170817—The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow

Focusing Our Gravitational Attention (GW170814)

by Shane L. Larson

Nature guards her secrets jealously, and wresting them from her grasp is an arduous, and frustrating task. One of the great difficulties of the modern world is that knowledge is so easy to pull up, with the flick of a finger across a screen, that we forget how hard it was to obtain that knowledge in the first place. Every bit of knowledge that you and I take for granted was earned, at great cost, by a long line of humans who came before us.

Knowledge is hard to come by, a fact that we often forget in an age where virtually any and all information is readily available on demand with a handheld device. [Image: S. Larson]

For just more than two  years now, we have lived in a new astronomical era, where astronomers have the ability to sense minute deviations in the shape of spacetime and use them to discover the secrets of the Cosmos. We call this science gravitational wave astronomy.

This new branch of observational astronomy burst on the scene with much fanfare in early 2016 when it was announced that the two LIGO gravitational wave observatories had detected a pair of black holes merging far across the Cosmos. We knew roughly where it was in the sky, but only roughly in the same sense that “Kansas is roughly in North America.” The physics of how an instrument like LIGO works means detection is easier than pointing — pointing to a gravitational wave source on the sky is hard, because Nature guards her secrets jealously.

We call gravitational wave detectors “observatories“, but they are very different from traditional telescopic facilities that you and I are familiar with. Telescopes work more or less like your eyes — they point in a given direction, and are sensitive to a narrow space in front of them (what astronomers call the “field of view“).

A daytime picture of the Moon, taken by holding my phone up to the eyepiece of my backyard telescope. The field of view is not much bigger than the Moon, which is very small on the sky. [Image: Shane L. Larson]

By contrast, gravitational wave detectors are largely omnidirectional — they can sense gravitational waves from every direction on the sky, though some directions are easier than others.  They are much more like your ears in this way. If you close your eyes, you can hear sounds in front of you, above you, to the sides, or behind you. You can usually point at a source of a sound, but that is because your brain is using both of your ears together to triangulate the position of the source of sound. Here’s an experiment: close your eyes and plug one of your ears. Have one of your friends stand somewhere in the room and sing “The Gambler” (here’s a version I particularly like, by First Aid Kit) and see if you can point to them. It’s not so easy to point with only one ear.

We use this same method of triangulation in gravitational wave astronomy — multiple detectors can point better than single detectors alone. The more detectors, the better a source of gravitational waves can be found on the sky.

The Virgo gravitational wave observatory, outside of Pisa, Italy, looking roughly northward toward the Monte Pisano Hills. [Image: Virgo Collaboration]

For the past two decades, at the same time LIGO was being built, our colleagues in Europe were constructing another gravitational wave observatory outside of Pisa, called Virgo. On 1 August 2017, the Advanced Virgo detector joined the two Advanced LIGO detectors in the search for gravitational waves.

There was much celebration in the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration that day, because gravitational wave detectors are not easy to build. Getting to the moment where all three advanced detectors were online together was a tremendous accomplishment, and one that held much promise. With three detectors, we should be able to pinpoint gravitational wave sources on the sky better than ever before. The holy grail of events would be to make a detection, and narrow the skyview to an area so small that one could reasonably point a telescope there and possibly see a simultaneous signal in light.

Doing directed astronomy with gravitational wave detectors requires a network of many facilities. As time goes on, more are being built around the world.

We held our breath, and dared not hope. That’s the nature of astronomy — it’s a spectator sport. All we can do is turn on our instruments, and sit here on Earth and wait for the Universe to do something awesome.

As it turns out, we didn’t have to wait long for something awesome. On 14 August 2017, all three detectors registered the gravitational wave signature from a pair of merging black holes.  At about 5:30am CDT in the United States (10:30:43 UTC), a signal came sailing through the Earth, ringing off each of the three gravitational wave detectors that were diligently collecting data, hour after hour, minute after minute, waiting for the Cosmos to do something. Nature did not let us down. The signal was a strong series of spacetime ripples, with the same pattern, showing up in each of the three detectors. We call the event GW170814 (here is a LIGO-Virgo factsheet on the event), and it brings the total number of events in the gravitational wave catalog to 4.

The GW170814 signal, as gravitational wave astronomers like to represent it. The top row shows the spectrograms, showing how the frequency (analogous to the pitch of a sound) evolves in time, chirping as you go from left to right. The lower row shows the waveform traces in time from left to right, growing stronger as the black holes approach and merge, then tapering away. [Image: LIGO-Virgo Collaboration, from our paper]

Below, I show a table I keep of events, and it is getting harder to manage! I like to take it out and stare at it sometimes because you can see a story beginning to emerge, and for a scientist there is nothing more exciting. A story is exactly what we’ve been trying to learn from Nature, but you can seldom figure it out from just one astronomical event. It is only the long, slow accumulation of happenings in the Cosmos that lets us begin to see the tantalizing patterns of what is going on. Lots of black holes. We’re beginning to get a sense for some trends in their masses. We’re beginning to figure out how many there might be, and how common they are in the Universe. Scientists, as a general rule, are a cautious lot. It will still be a while before there are definitive statements on Wikipedia or in astronomy textbooks. But buy your favorite gravitational wave astronomer a bag of jelly donuts (I also like Dr. Pepper), and they’ll talk your ear off about what we’re beginning to figure out.

My updated gravitational wave catalogue. [Image by Shane L. Larson]

But the real story of GW170814, is Virgo. Virgo came roaring on the scene, and transformed our ability to point on the sky. The sky location graphic below shows all of the gravitational wave events seen to date (including one interesting signal, called LVT151012 that wasn’t quite strong enough for us to make out perfectly in the data, but looks an awful lot like a black hole pair).  In every previous detection, the source was known to lie in some great banana shaped region of the sky that we call an error ellipse. With the addition of Virgo to the network, and the arrival of GW170814, we see the dramatic and awesome difference it makes, collapsing the giant banana of an error ellipse into a much smaller bubble on the sky. This bubble lies near the southern end of the constellation Eridanus (if you’d like to look at a starmap, it came from an area around RA = 3h 11m, DEC = -44d 47m). At the moment of the event, the source was directly overhead southern Chile.

The sky location of all gravitational wave events to date. [Image: LIGO/Virgo/NASA/Leo Singer (Milky Way image: Axel Mellinger)]

There were no detected signals with light associated with the event, but these were after all, black holes. By definition, black holes emit no light; if there is going to be something for traditional telescopes to see, there is going to have to be some kind of matter involved. And so, we wait for the next one. We can tell we’re on the cusp of a tremendous new era of astronomy. We still haven’t found the holy grail, an event seen with both gravitational waves and light, but we continue to look. With our growing network of detectors, and scientists around the globe, we will eventually make that discovery too.

Until then, my heartfelt congratulations to my colleagues and friends who I work with on LIGO and Virgo — here’s to many more long years of searching the Cosmos. Viva Virgo!

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You can read about the previous LIGO detections in my previous posts here:

The Harmonies of Spacetime – GW150914

My Brain is Melting – GW150914 (part 2)

The Cosmic Classroom on Boxing Day (GW151226)

New Astronomy at the New Year (GW170104)

 

New Astronomy at the New Year (GW170104)

by Shane L. Larson

Newton’s portrait.

January 4 holds a special place in the hearts of scientists — it is Isaac Newton’s birthday (*). Newton stood at the crossroads that led to modern science, and astronomy in particular. He was the first person to build a workable reflecting telescope, a design that now bears his name and for the past 4 centuries has been the dominant type of telescope used by amateurs and professionals alike. Newtonian telescopes have revealed much about the Cosmos to our wondering minds. Newton was also responsible for the first formulation of a physical law that describes the working of gravity, called the Universal Law of Gravitation. Today we use the Universal Law to launch satellites, send astronauts into orbit, convert the force of your feet on the bathroom scale into your “weight“, and a thousand other applications.  There is much to celebrate every January 4.

(L) Aerial view of LIGO-Hanford Observatory [top] and in Google Maps [Bottom]. (R) Aerial view of LIGO-Livingston Observatory [top] and in Google Maps [Bottom].

But on January 4, 2017 the Cosmos celebrated with us, singing in the faint whispers of gravity itself. On January 4, the signal of two black holes catastrophically merging to form a new bigger black hole washed quietly across the shores of Earth, carried on undulating vibrations of space and time. You were very likely unaware of this cosmic event — it happened at 4:11:58.6 am in Chicago. It was a Wednesday morning, and I imagine most people were blissfully asleep. But two of the grandest pieces of experimental apparatus ever built by humans were paying attention – the twin LIGO detectors in the United States.  For only the third time in history, a gravitational wave signal from the deep Cosmos was detected here on Earth.

The signal was the signature of two black holes (a “black hole binary,” in the lingo of the astrophysicists) merging to form a new, bigger black hole. The black holes, by definition, emit no light themselves. However, astronomers know that black holes can often be surrounded by swaths of interstellar gas. The intense gravity and motion of the black holes can stir the gas into a violent froth that can emit light. At the time of the event, the LIGO team sent out alerts to astronomers around the world, who turned their telescopes skyward looking for a tell-tale signature of light bursting from the energized gas. Our best estimate of the location of the event was canvased by 30 groups, in many different kinds of light ranging from radio waves, to optical light, to gamma rays. No tell-tale emissions of light were seen. The only way we were aware of this event is from the LIGO detectors themselves.

An artist’s impression of two black holes insprialling, near merger. [Image by Aurore Simonnet, SSU E/PO]

The Gravitational Wave Signal. We call the event GW170104, named for the date it was detected. The signal from the black holes registered first in the LIGO detector outside Hanford, Washington, and 3 milliseconds later registered at the LIGO detector outside Livingston, Louisiana. All told, it only lasted about 0.3 seconds. The signal exhibited the characteristic chirp shape expected of compact binaries that spiral together and merge — a long sequences of wave peaks that slowly grow in strength and get closer and closer together as the black holes spiral together.

Comparison of the chirp waveforms from the first 3 detected gravitational wave events. LVT151012 was a very quiet event that was not strong enough for LIGO scientists to be confident it was a pair of black holes. [Image: LIGO Collaboration]

During the early inspiral phase of GW170104, where the black holes are independent and distinct, the heavier black hole of the pair was 31 times the mass of the Sun, and the smaller black hole was 19 times the mass of the Sun. Ultimately, they reached a minimum stable distance (in astrophysics lingo: the “innermost stable circular orbit“) and plunged together to form a new bigger black hole. When that plunge happened, the gravitational wave signal peaked in strength, and then rang down and faded to nothing as the black hole pulled itself into the stable shape of single, isolated black hole. For GW170104, this final black hole was 49 times the mass of the Sun.

All of this happened 3 billion lightyears away, twice as far as the most distant LIGO detection to date. Perhaps these numbers impress you (they should) — they tell the story  of events that happened billions of years ago and in a place in the Cosmos that neither you, nor I, nor our descendants will ever visit. We add them today to a very short list of astronomical knowledge: the Gravitational Wave Event Catalogue, the complete list of gravitational wave signals ever detected by human beings. There are only three.

The current Gravitational Wave Catalogue, of all known events [click to make larger].

Take a close look at the list. There are interesting similarities and interesting differences between the three events. They are all black hole binaries. They are all at least a billion light years away from Earth. Some of the black holes are heavier than 20 times the mass of the Sun, and some are lighter than 20 times the mass of the Sun. Astronomers use those comparisons to understand what the Universe does to make black holes and how often.

This is the most important thing about GW170104 — it is a small but significant expansion to this very new, and currently, very limited body of knowledge we have about the Cosmos. These three events are completely changing the way we think about black holes in the Cosmos, forcing us to rethink long held prejudices we have about their masses and origins. We shouldn’t feel bad about that — evolving our knowledge is the purpose of science. LIGO is helping us do exactly what we wanted it to do: it is helping us learn.

What do we know? There are many things we are trying to learn from the meager data contained in these three signals. The new signal from GW170104 in particular has tantalizing evidence for the spin of the black holes, and some neat assessments of how close these astrophysical black holes are to what is predicted by general relativity. But I think the most important thing about the event from the perspective of astronomy is this: the black holes are, once again, heavy. GW170104 is the second most massive stellar mass binary black hole ever observed (GW150904 was the heaviest).

The masses of known black holes. The purple entries are observed by x-ray telescopes, and represent what we knew about the size of black holes before LIGO started making detections. [Image: LIGO Collaboration]

With the first two events we had one pair of heavy black holes (GW150914), and one pair of lighter black holes (GW151226). There is a great mystery hiding there: where do the heavy black holes come from, and how many are there in the Cosmos? Perhaps they are just a fluke, a random creation of Nature that is possibly unique in the Cosmos. But the detection of GW170104 suggests that this is not the case; we’ve once again detected heavy black holes. The race is on to decide how the Cosmos makes them. The answers to those questions are encoded in the properties of the black holes themselves. How many are there? Are they spinning or not? Are they spinning the same direction as one another? How do their masses compare to one another? GW170104 is another piece of the puzzle, and future detections will help solidify what we know.

How can you help? If you’d like to help the LIGO project out, let me direct your attention to one of our Citizen Science projects: GravitySpy. Your brain is capable of doing remarkable things that are difficult to teach a computer. One of those things is recognizing patterns in images. The LIGO detectors are among the most sensitive scientific instruments ever built; they are making measurements at the limit of our capabilities, and there are all kinds of random signals that show up in one detector or the other — we call them glitches.  It is very hard to teach a computer to tell the difference between glitches and interesting astrophysical events, so we have citizens just like you look at glitches and identify them, then we use that information to train the computer. So far citizens like you have helped LIGO classify more than two million glitches, and they put more on the pile every day.

If you’d like to help out too, head over to http://gravityspy.org/ and try it out; you can do it in your web-browser, or on your phone while you’re sitting on the train to work. We have citizens from kids to retirees helping us out. If gravitational waves aren’t your thing, there are more than 50 other projects in science, arts, history and more at http://zooniverse.org/ you can try out!

A representation of the GW170104 signal, from the scientific paper. These are the kinds of images citizens can classify easily, whereas computers sometimes have trouble. [Image: LIGO Collaboration]

PS: For all of you super-nerds out there, let me point something out if you haven’t already noticed. Suppose you were to parse the name of the signal in the following way: 1701 04. Look familiar? The 4th incarnation of 1701; for the cognoscenti, this event shares the designation of the Enterprise-D. 🙂  Until next time, my friends. Live long, and prosper.

(*) When Newton was born, England had not yet switched to the new Gregorian Calendar, which we use today. They were still using the older Julian Calendar, by which Newton was born on December 25; when converted Newton’s birthday falls on January 4 on the Gregorian Calendar.

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You can read about the previous LIGO detections in my previous posts here:

• The Harmonies of Spacetime – GW150914
• My Brain is Melting – GW150914 (part 2) 
• The Cosmic Classroom on Boxing Day (GW151226) 

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Many of my colleagues in the LIGO Virgo Collaboration have also written excellent blog posts about the GW170104 event, and the work we do to make gravitational wave astronomy a reality. You should visit their blogs!

• Christopher Berry [Birmingham] – GW170104 and me
• Richard O’Shaughnessy [Rochester] – GW170104: another binary black hole detected by gravitational waves
• Veronica Kondrashov [LIGO] – LIGO Detects Gravitational Waves for 3rd Time

My Brain is Melting — GW150914 (Part 2)

by Shane L. Larson

It has been just more than a week since we told the world about our great discovery. It was a cold winter morning in Washington DC, the temperature hovering just below freezing. In a room at the National Press Club, the world press had gathered, and at the behest of NSF Director, Frances Córdova, LIGO Executive Director, Dave Reitze, took to the podium.

“Ladies and gentlemen. We have detected gravitational waves. We did it!” Mic drop. (Well, he should have; in the movie dramatization, he will. You can watch the moment here on YouTube, or the full press conference.)

Dave Reitze makes the announcement to the world that LIGO had detected gravitational waves. “We did it!”

So began a ninety minute press conference delivering the news of the first gravitational wave detection to the world. In the days that followed, social media and press outlets exploded in a veritable tidal wave of excitement and awestruck wonder. On twitter, the hashtags #gravitationalwaves, #LIGO, and #EinsteinWasRight have accumulated more than 70 million tweets in just one week.

Everyone has the same sense that we scientists have — this is a doorway, now open, to a Universe we have only imagined. Beyond the threshold are certainly things we have predicted and speculated about, but also many wonders yet to be found or understood.

We have done our best to explain what we are doing with LIGO, and how it works. We have made a Herculean effort to describe the astrophysical significance of the discovery. We have tried mightily to explain what Einstein’s ideas about spacetime and gravity are all about.

But this is hard stuff to think about, it is hard stuff to understand, and it is hard stuff to explain. It is well outside our normal everyday experience, so it is easy to feel like your brain is melting.

You shouldn’t worry that these things are hard to understand. It took physicists 41 years to even decide gravitational waves were real, and then another 59 years to build an experiment capable of detecting them. There is no doubt these are hard, brain melting matters. But the beauty of the discovery of gravitational waves is that this can be understood!

A large number of my colleagues in LIGO (and myself) have spent the last week collecting and responding to questions emailed to us, asked in public forums, and delivered on social media (if you have more questions, ask in the comments below, or please email question@ligo.org). All of them are thoughtful, genuine, and demonstrate a pleasing curiosity and wonder about the nature and workings of the Cosmos. I am constantly amazed by the questions people ask.

Here are a few of the more common brain-melters we have been asked, and some meager attempt to answer them. The questions are marked in red, to make them easy to find. Some responses are more complicated than others, and you may or may not want to read them all. They are here to help stem the meltdown, if you find your brain is still reeling. 🙂

What does this mean for ordinary folks?  Far and away, this is the most common question I’ve been asked, particularly from the press. What does this mean for the world? How will this help my golf game?

LIGO’s discovery is what we call “fundamental physics.” It is a discovery that tells us something about how the Universe works and why it behaves the way it does. Figuring out how to use knowledge like that to make your life better or turning it into a gadget that’s useful in your kitchen or garage takes time — we’ve only just now made the first detection of gravitational waves, and are trying to wrap our brains around it.  Scientists and engineers will have to think a long time, maybe decades, before they can make this knowledge “useful for everyday life.”  That’s always how it works with scientific discoveries. How it will impact our everyday lives is not for us to know — that is for the future.

In the modern era, many of us navigate using GPS technology, built directly into our smartphones.

That is not to say that there isn’t some amazing future application. We only have to look at the history of general relativity itself to know the truth of this. Einstein worked out general relativity between 1905 and 1915. This was an age before cars and electricity were mainstays in everyday life. Yet Einstein had the where-with-all to understand that gravity could be thought of as the warpage of spacetime, and that one consequence of that warpage is clocks tick at different speeds depending on how strong the gravity is.

Did you know that little, obscure fact of general relativity is used by you and most other people every, single day? It is an essential part of how the GPS in your phone works. It took nearly a hundred years for the “fundamental physics” we call general relativity to be turned into an essential piece of technology that now gets millions of us from place to place in the world every day. Without GPS and general relativity, you’d still be navigating using paper maps. Einstein had to rely on his neighbor to tell him where to find a pub; you have a smartphone.

Is it really that important? I think this is one of the most important discoveries in astronomy in the last 100 years. It is as important as discovering that there are other galaxies beyond the Milky Way, it is as important as discovering the expansion of the Universe, it is as important as discovering the Cosmic Microwave Background.

The reason I think this is just about everything you’ve ever heard about the Universe, or seen a picture of, has been discovered using LIGHT. Telescopes are just instruments that do what your eyes do (collect light), though telescopes collect much more light than your eye or collect light that your eye cannot see (like infrared or ultraviolet light).

Gravitational waves are different — none of us have a “gravitational wave detector” as part of our bodies. Gravitational waves are something that we predicted should exist, and we built an experiment that showed us our ideas were right.  The beginning of gravitational wave observations will change how we see the Universe in ways that we cannot yet imagine.

Dr. France Córdova, Director of the National Science Foundation.

As a scientist and a teacher, I can appreciate the importance and utility of the collection of knowledge. But LIGO’s discovery goes far beyond the mere acquisition of yet another fact to post on Wikipedia. What the scientists and engineers working on LIGO have done was often regarded as impossible to do. But as Dr. Córdova intoned at the LIGO press conference, we took a big risk. Through a judicious application of sweat, brains, and stubbornness, we endured a decades long effort to design a machine to do the impossible. We encountered countless challenges and obstacles, and diligently overcame every single one of them to arrive at this day. That should make every person sit up a little bit straighter and prouder. That should make every single person aware that whatever challenges or problems we face on our small world, we have the means to overcome them, if we have the will to commit our time and brains and resources to them.

The black hole collision LIGO observed was more than 50 times brighter than all the stars in the Universe. How can that be?  The comparison is “the gravitational energy released by the merger is about 50 times the energy released by all the stars in the Universe during the same time.”  This is an example of a “Fermi problem” which astrophysicists use all the time to figure out if our numbers are right when we are doing complex calculations.

The night sky over the Pando Forest in central Utah. Pando is an 80,000 year old aspen grove — it has seen almost 30 million nights like this one, bathed in the light of the stars of the Milky Way. [Image: Shane L. Larson]

Astrophysicists measure brightness in watts, just like you are used to expressing the brightness of a light bulb in watts — the “wattage” tells you how much energy is released in a fixed amount of time. The higher the wattage, the more energy is released in a given moment, so the brighter the star (or bulb). Astronomers call this the “luminosity.” We can estimate the luminosity of all the stars in the Universe and compare it to what LIGO measured from the black holes. [[I’m going to use some scientific notation here to write some mind-bogglingly big numbers; a number like 10⁶ means a 1 followed by 6 zeroes: 10⁶ = 1,000,000. ]]

If you express the luminosity of the black holes (3 solar masses in just about 20 milliseconds) as a “wattage,” the brightness is about 3.6 x 10⁴⁹ watts, or about 10²³ times brighter than the Sun.

The Hubble Extreme Deep Field (XDF). We can use images like this to estimate the total number of stars in the Cosmos.

Now suppose we make the assumption that all the stars in the Universe are just like the Sun. This isn’t true, of course — some are brighter, some are dimmer, but on the average this is a good starting guess. There are about 100 billion stars in a galaxy like the Milky Way, and if you look at an image like the Hubble Extreme Deep Field, there are on order 100 billion galaxies in the Universe. So there are 100 billion x 100 billion = 10²² stars in the Universe. If each one of them is the brightness of the Sun, the total brightness of stars in the Universe is 10²² times the brightness of the Sun.

But we said the black hole merger seen by LIGO was 10²³ times brighter than the Sun, so: 10²³/10²² = 10. The black hole merger was 10x brighter than all the stars in the Cosmos. With a careful calculation, we could get the 50 number you hear from LIGO, but 10 is pretty close. This is the nature of Fermi problems — they don’t give you the exact number, but they quickly get you close to the exact number so you can understand the Universe.

What do you mean “spacetime is stretching LIGO’s arms?” What is spacetime? Spacetime is the substrate, the matrix upon which everything in the Universe is built — as we like to say, spacetime is the “fabric of the Cosmos.” It is, of course, easy to say that, but difficult to wrap your brain around. We’re used to not thinking about space at all; it is the nothing between everything. But it is exactly that nothing of which we speak — if we were not here, if nothing were here, there is still space.

Imagine a gravitational wave shooting through LIGO, directly out of the screen at you. (A) When there are no waves, the arms are at their fixed lengths. (B) When the wave first hits LIGO, the spacetime in one arm stretches and in the other arm compresses. This changes how long it takes light to go from the corner to the end of the arms and back again. (C) As the wave passes by, the arms change back and forth between stretching and compressing.

How do you measure the length of something in space? Most of the time we use a ruler or a tape measure. You lay it down along the thing you are interested in, like LIGO’s arms, and you see how many it takes. Imagine that you put down kilometer markers along LIGOs arms, just like you see on the highway — one at 0km, 1km, 2km, 3km and 4km. When spacetime between the ends of LIGO changes, the entire arm stretches. You still think the arm is 4 kilometers long, because the markers are still evenly spaced (the spacing is just larger than it was before, though you may not be aware of it). We need a way to measure the stretching without relying on the kilometer markers.

Visualization of LIGO interferometry. (A) When no gravitational wave is present, the laser timing is set up to make a “dark fringe” at the output [square panel on the right]. (B) At the output, the light is like waves canceling each other out. (C) When a wave stretches or compresses the arms, it changes how the light is added together at the output. [Frames from video by Caltech/LIGO]

A reliable way to measure the distance in a space that is changing and stretching, is to time a beam of light as it makes its way through the space you are trying to monitor. In LIGO, we use laser light. Imagine two photons, injected into LIGO at the corner, with a photon traveling down each of the two arms (in terms of the the optics, there is an element at the corner called a “beamsplitter” that splits a laser beam and sends part of it down each of the two arms). When there are no gravitational waves distorting LIGO, the two photons arrive back at the beam splitter and are combined to make an interference pattern, which is a brightness pattern that depends on how the photons arrive together. We set it up so the pattern is a “dark fringe” — the two photons cancel each other out (what physicists call “destructive interference”).

A simple demonstration of how sensitive interference can be to small shifts in space. These interference patterns are made with overlapping patterns of regular circles (as opposed to moving waves) and create Moiré patterns. Here the horizontal dark region in the left image is analogous to LIGO’s “dark fringe.” The difference between the left and right image is a shift of only 0.05 inches, but the pattern difference is easy to see. What was a “dark fringe” now has a sliver of white, indicating the shift happened. [Image: S. Larson]

When a gravitational wave goes through LIGO it stretches the spacetime in one arm, and compresses the spacetime in the other arm. That means the photon in the stretched arm arrives back at the beam splitter LATE (it had farther to travel) and the photon in the compressed arm arrives at the beam splitter EARLY (it had less distance to travel). The result is the brightness pattern CHANGES. The changing pattern of brightness is exactly in tandem with the passing gravitational wave, telling us about the shape of the wave as it passes by.

They said the stretching that LIGO measured was a fraction of the width of a proton. But I remember from Chemistry that atoms are always moving, so how can you make such a precise measurement? Remember that LIGO is not measuring the distance shift in single atoms — it is watching the mirror, which is comprised of many atoms, each of which is moving exactly as you remember from Chemistry.

Everyone on a boat is doing their own thing, but they are all moving together as the boat moves on the waves.

When we make our measurements, we are looking at the behaviour of many, many photons that have travelled down the arm together, hit the mirrors, and made the return journey. Sure — some of the atoms are going one way, and some are going some other way, but overall they are all moving together, going wherever gravity is pushing the center of mass of the mirror. When we read out the light, we are looking at all of those photons that hit the mirror at the same time and using that information to determine where the mirror is.

It’s a bit like having a big gravitational wave discovery party on a boat. If you are on the shore, watching all the physicists and engineers having a good time, you see they are all going every which way on the deck. But they are all on the boat, which moves them all together in response to the underlying waves of the sea.

Will this help with time travel? quantum gravity?  Einstein’s great discovery with general relativity was the idea that gravity can be described as the interaction of mass with the shape and warpage of spacetime. The unification of space and time into a single entity — spacetime — is a huge conceptual leap that is sometimes hard to come to grips with because of the way we think about space and time.

In our everyday lives we measure space with rulers and car odometers, and we measure time with wristwatches and calendars. If they are the same thing, why don’t we measure them the same way? The idea that the two are connected takes some getting used to, though as I like to remind people: when you go somewhere, you are usually comfortable saying your destination is “25 minutes” away or saying “20 miles” away!

You think about travel as travelling through space or travelling through time without even noticing! You are used to being a “spacetime traveller.”

Since gravitational waves are moving ripples, propagating warpage in spacetime, it is natural to ask: can this discovery can help us understand space and time? Can we understand “time travel” and “warp drive?”

Time itself, despite being part of general relativity, is still a great mystery to us. But what we often forget is that we are time travelers. Even as you are reading this, you are traveling through time from this moment, heading toward next Tuesday. It is not possible, so far as we know, to go backward toward last Friday, and that is a great mystery. It appears to be true based on experimental evidence, but we don’t yet understand how the laws of Nature — general relativity — tell us that. So in as much as gravitational waves will dramatically improve our understanding of how spacetime works and behaves, that deeper understanding could lead us down a path of thinking that will ultimately give us more insight into the mystery of time.

In a similar way, the LIGO detection does not address the enduring questions about the microscopic, quantum nature of gravity. The gravitational waves are a “big world” phenomenon, created by strongly gravitating astrophysical objects. But based on our experience with other quantum physics, we expect that there will be a clear (though not now obvious) connection between quantum gravity and general relativity. The more we expand our understanding of general relativity, it becomes more likely we will stumble on the deep connections that would lead to ultimately understanding quantum gravity.

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I encourage you to continue asking your favorite physicist your questions and share what you learn. Also, send questions to: question@ligo.org

Remember: no question is a dumb question. If you are wondering something, I’ll bet you a jelly donut someone else has the exact same question!

The Harmonies of Spacetime — GW150914

by Shane L. Larson

I have a good friend, Tyson, whom I don’t get to see nearly often enough. We are both privileged to be among the first generation of scientists who will know the Universe by observing the faint whisper of spacetime, bending under the influence of massive astrophysical systems. We are “gravitational wave astronomers.”

Picking crab with Tyson (far right) and family. [Image: Sabrina Savage]

A while back we were sitting on his back porch late into the evening, picking crab and talking about everything. It was the kind of common, easy conversation among friends that ranges over movies, politics, family, childhood memories, inside jokes, and so on. But at one point, the conversation drifted back to science and to the near future. Tyson said something that really just kind of made us all stop in shocked silence: “If we’re really going to detect gravitational waves in the next 3 or 4 years, they are already closer than Alpha Centauri and heading right for us.”

Whoa.

Little did we know then how prescient that observation was. We are both part of a project called LIGO — the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory. And this morning our collaboration made the big announcement.

Frame from a visualization of the binary black hole merger seen by LIGO [Visualization by “Simulating Extreme Spacetime” (SXS) Collaboration]

On 14 September 2015, the two LIGO observatories detected a very loud gravitational wave event. Our analysis since that day has told us that it was the merger of two black holes — one 29 times the mass of the Sun, the other 36 times the mass of the Sun. The two black holes merged, forming a new, bigger black hole 62 times the mass of the Sun. We named the event after the date: GW150914.

All of this happened about 400 Megaparsecs from Earth (1.3 billion lightyears). If you are adding up the numbers, you see that there are 3 solar masses missing. That is the equivalent mass that was radiating away from the system in the energy of the gravitational waves.

Make no doubt about it — this is one of the most momentous discoveries in the history of astronomy. It will be up to historians of science to place this within context, but I would rank it right up there with the discovery of the nature of the spiral nebulae and the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background.

There are many important and stunning parts of this story. Let’s me tell you just a small slice of how we got to today.

LIGO: LIGO is two gravitational wave observatories that work together as a single experiment. The are located 3002 kilometers apart, with one in Hanford, Washington and the other in Livingston, Louisiana. They are enormous, 4 kilometers to a side — so large, they can be seen in satellite photos.

(L) Aerial view of LIGO-Hanford Observatory [top] and in Google Maps [Bottom]. (R) Aerial view of LIGO-Livingston Observatory [top] and in Google Maps [Bottom].

The observatories are “laser interferometers” — laser light is injected into the the detector, and split so it flies up and down each of the two arms. When the light returns back to the splitter, it is recombined. When you combine laser light in this way, it can be combined such that the beams cancel out (making what we call a “dark fringe”) or they combine to make a bright spot (making what we call a “bright fringe”); in between combinations have a full range between bright and dark. We sit on a “dark fringe.”

Schematic of the LIGO interferometers, showing the basic layout of the lasers and optics locations. The lasers travel up and down the two 4 kilometer long arms, and are recombined and detected at the photodetector. [Image: S. Larson & LIGO Collaboration]

When a gravitational wave hits LIGO, it stretches and compresses the arms. The result is that it changes how long it takes the lasers to travel from the splitter to the end mirror and back. If that happens, when the lasers are recombined the brightness of the fringe changes.

What Happened? Both the LIGO detectors run more or less continuously, and we get our primary science data when they are on at the same time. In the early morning hours of 14 September 2015, at 4:50:45am Central Daylight Time, a signal was detected in the Livingston detector. 7 milliseconds later, a signal was also detected in the Hanford detector. These detections are sensed automatically by sophisticated software that looks for things that are “out of the ordinary.” Notable events are logged, and then humans can take a look at them. In this case, we knew almost immediately it was significant because it was in BOTH detectors, and it was a strong signal (we use words like “loud” and “bright” to mean strong, but we don’t really “hear” or “see” the signals in the usual sense; these are descriptive adjectives that are helpful because of the analogy they make with our normal senses).

Spectrograms of the event at Hanford and Livingston. The darker areas are what a “typical” spectrogram might look like; the bright swoops are the (very noticeable) signal! [Image: LIGO Collaboration]

One of the easiest ways to see the signal is in a diagram called a “spectrogram” which shows how the signal in the detector changes in time. Once we had the first spectrograms, the emails began to fly.

Finding Out: We all get LOTS of email, so it took a while before everyone in the collaboration actually realized what was going on. I didn’t hear until the night of September 15. AT 9:35pm CST I got an email from Vicky Kalogera, the leader of our group, that said “have you caught any of what’s going on within LIGO?” We had a round of email with unbearably long delays between them, but by 11:35pm, I had our initial understanding/guesses in my hands. That was enough to do what we all do in science — we make some calculations and extrapolations to understand what we have seen, and to plan what we should do next. We want to figure out what the new result might mean! Here’s the page out of my Moleskine, where I started to compute what a detector in space, like LISA, might be able to see from a source like this.

My journal page from the hour after I first found out about the event. [Image: S. Larson]

The Importance: There are all kinds of reasons why this discovery is important. If you take your favorite gravitational physicist out for pizza, they’ll talk your ear off for hours about exactly why this is important. But let me tell you the two I think the most about.

First, this is the first direct detection of gravitational waves. It is the first time we have built an experiment (LIGO) and that experiment has responded because a gravitational wave passed through it. This is the beginning of gravitational wave astronomy — the study of the Cosmos using gravity, not light.

Second, this is the first time that we have directly detected black holes, not observed their effects on other objects in the Universe (stars or gas).

The Astrophysics: The two black holes, caught in a mutual gravitational embrace, had spent perhaps a million years slowing sliding ever closer together, a long and lonely inspiral that ended with their merger into a single, bigger black hole. This is the first time we know conclusively of the existence of black holes that are tens of solar masses in size. Such black holes have been predicted in theoretical calculations, but never seen in the Cosmos before.

A more technical simulation of the binary black hole merger; gravitational physicsists and astronomers will be comparing the data to their simulations to examine how well we understand “real” black holes. [Image: SXS Collaboration]

Our next big question is “how often does this happen?” If it happens a lot, that is a potential clue pointing to where such black holes come from. If it is a rare event, that also tells us something. So now, we wait — this is just the beginning of LIGO observations, and after a few years of listening for more, we’ll know how common these are.

The People: Science is a way of thinking about the Universe, and so often when we talk about science we talk about Nature — all the wonder, all the mystery, the rules of the Cosmos. But science is a uniquely human endeavour and every momentous discovery is the culmination of countless hours of sweat, uncountable failures, and equally uncountable tiny moments of success that culminate at a profound moment of knowing something new. It would not be possible without the dedication of enormous numbers of people. The world gravitational wave community has been working toward this day for decades. More than 1000 authors appear on the discovery paper, and there are thousands of others who have worked and are working on the project, who are not in that list of authors. It has been a heroic effort on the part of physicists, astronomers, optical engineers, data and computer scientists, technical and support staff, professors and students.

Just some of the thousands of people who have made LIGO a reality and the detection of GW150914 possible. [Images from the LIGO Collaboration]

Teasing out the secrets of Nature is hard. Since before recorded history began, our distant ancestors  have plumbed the mysteries of the Cosmos using tools that Nature gave us — our five senses. Astronomer Edwin Hubble once opined “Equipped with his five senses, man [sic] explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.” (Harper’s Magazine 158: 737 [May, 1929]).

Today, we add a new sense to our quest to understand the Cosmos. TODAY the Era of Gravitational Wave Astronomy opens. Within the next few years, we will no longer live in a world where our view of the Cosmos is limited to what light alone can tell us. TODAY, we see the Cosmos anew, with senses attuned to the fabric of space and time itself!

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I’ve written about gravitational waves here at WriteScience before. In many of those I’ve explored what the physical description and meaning of gravitational waves are, and what the endeavour to detect them is all about. If you’d like to take a stroll down memory lane, here are links to those old posts:

• An early post about what it takes to build a machine like LIGO. “Knowing something about everything”
• When the BICEP2 results were first announced, I wrote a three part series about what they were looking for, what gravitational waves are all about, and how scientists were going to move forward after their announcement.
  • “Behind the Curtains of the Cosmos 1: Inflation and the Microwave Background”
  • “Behind the Curtains of the Cosmos 2: Gravitational Waves”
  • “Behind the Curtains of the Cosmos 3: Keys to the Cosmos”
• I wrote a long, 13 part series for the GR Centennial year. As part of that series, I wrote two posts about gravitational waves. At the bottom of each of these posts are links to little 3 minute YouTube videos I did to accompany them.
  • “Gravity 11: Ripples in Spacetime”
  • “Gravity 12: Listening for the Whispers of Gravity”
• I work on another gravitational wave experiment called LISA, and we just launched a spacecraft to test our ideas called LISA Pathfinder, so I wrote a bit about that too. “This is just the beginning”

Many of my colleagues in LIGO are also blogging about this momentous discovery. I will add their links here as they appear, so you can read their accounts as well:

• Christopher Berry (Birmingham)
• Rebecca Douglas (Glasgow)
• Sean Leavey (Glasgow)
• Matt Pitkin (Glasgow)
• Brynley Pearlstone (Glasgow)
• Amber Stuver (LIGO)
• Daniel Williams (Glasgow)
• Roy Williams (Caltech LIGO)
• Andrew Williamson (Cardiff)

 

This is just the beginning

by Shane L. Larson

Each morning, I roll out of bed, dutifully feed the three cats that own me, help my fourth-grader get her backpack put together for the day and put my daily secret note in her lunch, enjoy a few brief moments over morning coffee with my spouse, and then it is off to work.

For my day job, I’m a scientist. My friends and I work in a completely new branch of astronomy called gravitational wave astronomy. Our express goal is to detect a phenomenon that was predicted almost a century ago by Einstein: the undulations and propagating ripples in the fabric of spacetime that signify the dynamic motion of matter in the Cosmos.

Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime; propagating disturbances caused by the dynamical motion of heavy masses, like black holes or neutron stars.

Gravitational waves are expected to be a phenomenal probe of the Cosmos because they are readily generated by objects that are otherwise hard to detect by other means. This includes objects of intense interest to astronomers, like neutron stars, stellar mass black holes, white dwarfs, cosmic strings, and supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies. Despite their apparent utility in astronomy, the are exceedingly hard to detect. When Einstein first deduced their existence, he famously showed that the waves were so weak he thought we might never be able to measure them. But as is often the case, the future is full of wonders, and with the advent of the Space Age, people began to question that judgement. Maybe, with some cleverness and awesome technology, we could gaze at the Universe with gravity rather than light.

As with many scientific endeavours, gravitational wave detection is a difficult task because we’ve never built machines to do this before. We are learning how to do everything for the first time. You try things out, making your best guess as to how it is all going to work, but when you finally flick the switch to “on” you can debug your experiment because it is right in front of you.  That’s all well and good when your lab is here on planet Earth, but when you shift your experiments to space, it becomes a bit more difficult.

LISA will be a constellation of 3 spacecraft, 5 million kilometers apart, shining lasers at each other. [Image: Astrium]

Someday we want to build a space observatory for measuring gravitational waves, called LISA — the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. LISA consists of three spacecraft, each about 2 meters in diameter and 50cm deep. They fly in space, 5 million kilometers apart, and shine lasers back and forth between themselves. We time the flight of those lasers (nominally just over 16.6 seconds from one spacecraft to another) and if a gravitational wave blasts through LISA, we see the laser times change.

So how do we go about building new spacecraft for the first time? We take things in stages, just like you and I do when we try to learn something new. When I want to learn to play guitar, I don’t take the stage on Day One with Dr. Brian May; instead I get an old beater guitar out of the basement and I plunk out riffs of “Old Sussanah” until my fingers bleed. Then I work on the guitar solo in “Brighton Rock.”  Building spacecraft is kind of the same thing.

Artists conception of the LISA Pathfinder spacecraft. [Image: European Space Agency]

No space observatory like LISA has ever been built before, so we have to figure out how to do it. How do you build the laser timing system? How do you set up the spacecraft thrusters to respond to external influences like the solar wind? How do you get the whole thing into orbit in one piece, then set it up so it works? How do you control spacecraft temperature to the precision we need?  The best way to answer all of these questions, and to discover all the pitfalls we haven’t imagined, is to build one. This is one of the primary reasons we built a spacecraft called LISA Pathfinder.

LISA Pathfinder is an “almost LISA”. The spacecraft itself is roughly the size and shape of a LISA spacecraft, but it’s guts are slightly different. Deep down inside, it has a linked laser system that is easiest to think of as if it is just an entire LISA arm, shrunk down to fit on a single spacecraft. This is not ideal for doing astrophysical work, but it is perfect for understanding how the spacecraft are going to work in space.

The heart of LISA Pathfinder (the “payload” in spaceflight lingo). A laser system monitors two freely flying “test masses” (2 kg cubes of gold & platinum). [Image: European Space Agency]

Throwing a robot into space is hard. You have to get it to outer space, and get it there in one piece! The usual way you get things into space (so far) is with rockets. Putting aside the fact that they sometimes explode, a rocket ride to space is not the gentlest experience in the world. It’s loud — noise levels in proximity to a typical rocket engine are a million-billion times louder than sound you encounter at home every day. It shakes a LOT — rocket vibrations back and forth across the body of a rocket can be so strong they have led to catastrophic destruction of the rocket itself. The launch forces are enormous — human spaceflight engineers keep launch forces low for crew comfort (the maximum on space shuttle flights was about 3 times Earth gravity), but rockets without human crews regularly reach 5 to 10 times Earth gravity during launch. Add that all together, and the ride to space can be pretty rough. So how do you get a sensitive gravitational wave experiment into space, all in one piece and undamaged, on a rough and tumble rocket ride?

Hucking robots into space is hard, to be sure, but using a robot you threw into space to do science can be even harder. First, everything has to work. When your robot is tens of thousands of kilometers away from the closest space engineer, you can’t tinker with it — there’s no tightening up bolts, no replacing faulty lasers, no kicking stuck gear boxes, nor swapping out new battery packs. Second, the environment of space is harsh — there’s no air, the Sun is constantly blasting and heating one side of your spacecraft while the other side is turned toward the frigid chill darkness of deep space. And all the while, your dedicated space robot is bathing in a constant wash of hard cosmic radiation. Every ultra-sensitive space experiment has to weather through those hardships, while collecting data that would be hard to collect even under controlled laboratory conditions on Earth.

So you take a baby step, and you test everything first on Earth, then in space. This is the purpose of LISA Pathfinder. To teach us how to build a spaceborne gravitational wave detector, then to show we know how to get the thing safely to space, then once we’re in space, we turn it all on to show that we can do the actual experiment we want to do.

LISA Pathfinder launch on a Vega rocket (VV06). [Image: European Space Agency]

On December 2, after many years of design and laboratory work, LISA Pathfinder was launched atop a Vega rocket from Kourou Space Center in French Guiana. It has gone through a series of orbital burns that are sending it to a neutral “Lagrange point” between the Earth and Sun, where it will enter a “halo orbit” to test its lasers, thrusters, and spacecraft guidance systems in the very same way that LISA will have to work. So far, the flight has been flawless.

Just a few of the people who worked on LISA Pathfinder, my colleagues Karsten Danzmann (L), Paul McNamara (C), and Stefano Vitale (R). [Image: Paul McNamara]

What constantly amazes me about the people who build these machines is their diligence and tenacious attention to detail. A robot that we huck into space is not just a dumb hunk of metal. It is an amazing complex machine that is capable of thinking and taking care of itself. It conducts experiments that we tell it to do, stores the results of those experiments and faithfully beams the information back to Earth. At the same time, it is surviving one of the most hostile environments known: the vacuum of space. The influence of the Sun produces drastic temperature shifts across your spacecraft. Cosmic radiation is constantly bathing the spacecraft in a wash of seething, energetic particles. And all the while it has to gather and store energy, and all the zillions of parts and components have to work together, flawlessly and seamlessly.

Your car is also an amazingly complex machine. But if some piece of it stops working and leaves you on the side of US Route 50 in Nevada (the Loneliest Highway in America), a passing motorist will still happen along to help you, or you can make a quick call to the motor club to come tow you. There are no such luxuries in the game of space exploration.

The scientists and engineers who contemplate these things every day are ingenious and clever. The delivery of LISA Pathfinder was the culmination of a decade long effort by an enormous team of scientists and engineers. And all the while they were designing and building LISA Pathfinder, they were teaching classes, and training new students and young scientists who will go on to do new and awesome things in the future. These are the people who make our modern world go ’round. I have nothing but admiration for my colleagues who have built and flown this marvelous machine.

So, at long last, the beginning has arrived. We are all simultaneously exhilarated, relieved, joyous, and eager for the next bit of news and the latest results to get here. Because this is only the beginning, the culmination of decades of hard work, difficult hardships, and anticipation. The BEST stuff — the detection of gravitational waves from the Cosmos — is yet to come.

Gravity 12: Listening for the Whispers of Gravity

by Shane L. Larson

The Cosmos is alive with energetic happenings.  Planets barrel along their orbits, unstoppable by anything short of a collision with another planet.  There is a cluster orbiting the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, with stars being flung and slingshot around their orbits like they were nothing more than ping-pong balls. Massive stars, in a last desperate gasp for attention, explode and spew their guts all around the galaxy, leaving a dark, compact skeleton behind. Billions of light years away, the shredded remains of galaxies slowly coalesce to make a larger elliptical galaxy and their central black holes dance together in a deadly inspiral, spewing jets of energetic material outward to mark their titanic struggle.

Gravitational waves are created by the dynamic motion of mass, a common occurrence in the Cosmos: supermassive black holes mergering or eating stars, stars exploding, and compact interacting binaries are all likely sources.

All of these examples have one thing in common: huge masses moving in dynamic ways.  The changing gravitational structure in these systems will manifest itself as gravitational waves propagating across the Cosmos, whispering ripples in the structure of space and time.  Encoded in those waves, if we could detect them, is a previously unheard story for the reading.

The “sticky bead experiment,” worked out at the 1957 Chapel Hill conference, taught us the effect of gravitational waves on the world: they change the distance between points in spacetime. Once we knew what physical effect to look for, physicists began to ask “how do we detect it?”  It was straight-forward to compute the size of the distance change caused by gravitational waves, and it was tiny. But seemingly impossible measurements have never stopped physicists and astronomers from trying to imagine clever and imaginative ways to probe Nature’s secrets.

One of the first people to seriously consider how to measure the extremely tiny stretching effect of gravitational waves was Joseph Weber at the University of Maryland. After the Chapel Hill conference he began to think seriously about the problem of gravitational wave detection, and settled on a clever and imaginative idea: if gravitational waves change the distance between any two points in spacetime, it should stretch a physical object as they pass through it. Once the wave goes by, the inter-atomic forces that hold the object together take over, and try to snap it back into its original shape. This kind of snapback motion would set up acoustic waves — sound waves — in the object. If you could detect those tiny, faint sound waves, it would be an indicator of the passage of a gravitational wave.  Weber fashioned such an experiment from a 0.61 meter diameter, 1.5 meter long cylinder of aluminum that massed 1.5 tons. Such a device is now called a Weber Bar.

(L) Joe Weber instrumenting his bar detector with sensors in the 1960’s. (R) You can visit the bar, live and in person, at the LIGO-Hanford Observatory.

There are, of course, many influences and physical effects that can set off acoustic vibrations in a large aluminum bar. Random acoustic vibrations could be mistaken for a gravitational wave, or more likely, hide the putative effect of a passing gravitational wave. Random signals like this are called noise; filtering noise is one of the foremost problems in any experiment. The solution to this difficulty is to have more than one bar; you set them up and wait to see if both bars ring off at the same time. Since noise is random, it is unlikely to influence both bars identically at the same time, so a common signal is most likely a gravitational wave. Weber’s detection program grew to include a second bar at Argonne National Laboratory that operated in coincidence with the bar he had built in Maryland.

By the late 1960’s, Weber’s analysis of his bar data convinced him he was seeing coincident events, which he dutifully reported to the scientific community.  The ensuing debate has been roundly documented (e.g. in Harry Collin’s book “Gravity’s Shadow”), but that tale is not germane to our discussion here. The important point is this: the scientific community suddenly became cognizant of the idea that gravitational waves could be detected through clever, high precision experiments, and Joe Weber set us on that path.

(Top L) The EXPLORER bar at CERN; (Top R) the AURIGA bar in Italy; (Lower L) The NAUTILUS bar in Italy; (Lower R) The new MiniGRAIL detector at Leiden.

In the years following the construction of the Maryland experiment, many other Weber bars were built around the world. These included ALLEGRO at Louisiana State University; EXPLORER at CERN; NAUTILUS in Frascati, Italy; AURIGA at the INFN in Legnaro, Italy; and Niobe in Perth, Australia.  While most of the classic bars have gone offline, new efforts in bar detection technology have turned to spherical detectors, of which MiniGRAIL at Leiden University is the archetype. But still, no gravitational wave signal has been confirmed by any bar.

Given the steadfast absence of confirmed signals in our detectors, why are physicists so confident in the existence of gravitational waves? The answer lies in traditional, telescopic observations of the Cosmos.

The Hulse-Taylor pulsar is located just off the wing of Aquila.

In 1974, radio astronomers Joseph Taylor and Russel Hulse were observing on the 305 meter diameter Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico. They were looking for new pulsars, and discovered one in the constellation of Aquila. Pulsing every 59 milliseconds, the pulsar rotates at a staggering 17 times per second. After studying it for some time, Hulse and Taylor noticed that the pulses varied regularly every 7.75 hours. The explanation? The pulsar was orbiting another neutron star (that was not pulsing)!  Masquerading under the scientific name PSR B1913+16, this remarkable system is more readily known by its common name: the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar, or usually “THE Binary Pulsar.” We can track the arrival time of the pulses from the pulsar in the system, and precisely determine the size and shape of the orbit over time. After 40 years of observations, it is clear that the orbit of the binary pulsar is shrinking, by an amount of roughly 3.5 meters per year. This is exactly the amount of orbital decay astronomers expect to see if gravitational waves were carrying energy away from the system, sucking the energy out of the orbit. If all goes according to Nature’s plan, the orbit will decay to the point of collision in 300 million years (mark your calendars!).

The system has a neutron star that orbits with a pulsar — the pulsar is a neutron star that sweeps a strong radio beam toward the Earth as it rotates. As they orbit, they emit gravitational waves, causing the orbit to shrink.

We now know of many systems like the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar, giving astronomers confidence that gravitational waves do, without question, exist. So why haven’t we seen them?  The problem with Weber bars is they are “narrow band” — they are most sensitive to gravitational waves that are close matches to the sound waves that are made in the bar (a condition physicists call “resonant” — the gravitational waves closely match the shape and vibration time of the sound waves, so they reinforce each other). Since it is  unlikely a gravitational wave source will exactly match your bar’s vibration frequency, and because many phenomena generate gravitational waves at all kinds of different frequencies, an ideal detector should be “broad band” — sensitive to a wide range of gravitational waves. One solution is to build a laser interferometer.

Michelson (T) and Morley (B) built one of the first interferometers to make precision measurements.

Interferometers have a storied history with relativity and astronomy. The earliest scientific interferometers were made in the 1880’s by Albert A. Michelson, and used by Michelson and his collaborator Edward Morley to examine the propagation of light. The results of their experiments demonstrated to the scientific community that light was not propagated by a “luminiferous aether,” and was in fact able to propagate in pure vacuum. Their conclusions also support the founding postulates of special relativity, namely that all observers measure the speed of light in vacuum to be a constant, irrespective of their state of motion.

In the decades that followed, interferometry became a recognized technique for making precise measurements that could not be obtained in any other way. By the time the first results from Weber bars were being reported, people were thinking about other ways to make precision distance measurements, and laser interferometry was a prime candidate technology. The first laser interferometer designed for gravitational wave detection was a table-top experiment built in 1971 at Hughes Aircraft by Robert Forward, who was a student of Weber’s.

(L) Bob Forward’s first gravitational wave interferometer at Hughes Aircraft. (R) Rai Weiss’ initial sketch of the components and operation of a laser interferometer like LIGO.

A year later, Rai Weiss at MIT published a report outlining in great detail the basic considerations for building what would evolve into modern day gravitational wave interferometers. Those initial musings came to fruition in the 1990s, when kilometer scale interferometers began to be constructed around the world with one intention: to observe the Cosmos in gravitational waves.

In the United States, there are two observatories that are called LIGO: one is in Hanford, Washington and the other is in Livingston, Louisiana. In Europe, a 600 meter interferometer called GEO-600 was built outside Hannover, Germany, and a 3 kilometer interferometer called VIRGO was built outside of Pisa, Italy. The Japanese built a 300 meter prototype in Tokyo called TAMA, but have now embarked on a much more ambitious instrument built underground in the Kamioka Observatory called KAGRA. These instruments are enormous endeavours, on the scale of large particle accelerators in terms of their physical size and in terms of the number of people required to bring the project to fruition. All of them can be seen from space (just fire up Google Earth or Google Maps: LIGO-Hanford from space, LIGO-Livingston from space, VIRGO from space, and GEO-600 from space).

(Top L) LIGO-Hanford; (Top R) LIGO-Livingston; (Lower L) GEO-600; (Lower-R) VIRGO.

For the first time, these observatories will show us a view of the Cosmos seen not with light, but with the whisper of gravity. The bread-and-butter source, the thing we expect to detect most often, are the merger of two neutron stars. Viewed from the right seats, such collisions generate tremendous explosions known as gamma ray bursts, but we only see a small fraction of the gamma ray bursts in the Universe because they aren’t all pointing toward us. LIGO and its fellow observatories will have no such difficulties — gravitational waves are emitted in every direction from these cataclysmic mergers.

What will we learn from these events? We hope to learn what the skeletons of exploded stars are like — what is their size and what are they made of? What is the matter at their cores like, and what do they become when they merge? Every detected neutron star merger is a clue in the story of stellar lives, which of course, is part of our story too, because we are all of us descended from the exploded ashes of ancient stars.

Where do all these stellar skeletons come from? It’s a curious thing, looking out at the sky. The thing we see the most of are stars, and over the course of a human life, they change little if at all. Night after night, the stars wheel overhead, distant points of light that no human has ever visited, and no human is likely to visit in my and your lifetimes. But over the last few centuries, through a careful application of technology smothered under an insatiable desire to know, we have figured out their story. Like shrewd protégés of Jane Marple, we have pieced together many parts of the the puzzle to discover how stars are born, how they live, and ultimately how they die. Gravitational wave astronomy investigates these final end-states of stellar life. But when we see the stars, we are seeing the snapshot of the stars alive today — where are all the stars that have gone before?

They litter the galaxy — the Milky Way is a vast graveyard of stellar remnants, the burned out stellar husks of those stars that came before. Since only the largest stars produce neutron stars and black holes, and most stars are lighter-weight, like the Sun, astronomers think most of that stellar graveyard is full of white dwarf stars — tens of millions of them.

LIGO can’t see white dwarf stars because they are too big — they never shrink to small enough orbits to make gravitational waves that LIGO can detect. If we want to study this part of the stellar life story, we have to build something new.

In the next decade, NASA and ESA hope to fly laser interferometers in space. The LISA gravitational wave observatory will consist of three free flying spacecraft 5 million kilometers apart, using lasers to measure the distance between the three spacecraft. The first step toward flying LISA is a mission called LISA-Pathfinder that will launch in October 2015.

LISA will listen in on the gentle gravitational whispers of tens of millions of white dwarf stars — so many whispers that the galaxy will actually sound like racous party. Like any rowdy party, there will be loud contributors that can always be heard above the noise, perhaps as many as 20,000 that shout out above the cacophony.  These systems are called “ultra-compact binaries”, and orbit each other on orbits so small they would fit between the Earth and the Moon. We think of LISA’s view of the Cosmos as being complementary to LIGO’s — with observations from both observatories, we will be able to construct our first complete picture of the “decomposition phase” of stellar evolution.

But perhaps the most interesting thing LISA will detect are the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. Some of the most fantastic pictures we have taken of the Cosmos show galaxies in collision. Occurring over billions of years, the graceful and delicate spirals are shredded, giving birth to a new, transformed galaxy. How often does this happen? Do all galaxies experience this at some point in their lives, or is it rare? How does it change the kinds of galaxies we see? Does it change the shapes of galaxies irrevocably, or do they return to their whirling spirals of arms?  And perhaps most interesting, what happens to the black holes that once lurked in their cores?

Examples of colliding galaxies. (T) NGC 4676 [the Mice], and (B) NGC 6621

If astronomers are correct, those black holes will sink to the core of the new galaxy that forms, and eventually merge together. When they do, they will emit a wailing burst of gravitational waves that will be visible to LISA all the way to the edge of the Observable Universe. Encoded in that cry will be the birth announcement of a new, bigger black hole, as well as the threads of the story that led to its birth — where they were born, when they were born, and what the Cosmos was like at that time.

These stories and more are contained in the faint whispers of gravity that even now are washing across the shores of Earth. As you are reading this, astronomers and physicists are tuning up our technology to listen closely to those faint messages, and when we finally hear them, they will transform the way we think about the Cosmos.

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This post is part of an ongoing series written for the General Relativity Centennial, celebrating 100 years of gravity (1915-2015).  You can find the first post in the series, with links to the successive posts in this series here: http://wp.me/p19G0g-ru.

Gravity 11: Ripples in Spacetime

by Shane L. Larson

We have travelled far in our journey to explore gravity, far from home and into the deep reaches of the Cosmos. But all that we know, all that we have learned, has been discovered from our home here, on the shores of the Cosmic Ocean. Today, let us return home.  In the words of the space poet Rhysling,

We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth
Let us rest our eyes on the fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.

Imagine yourself in a soft green meadow, far from the hub-bub of everyday life. What do you hear? What do you see? The gentle rustle of the trees, and the whisper of the long grass. The tall flowers of spring rocking gently back and forth, and the dark shadows of a bird of prey soaring effortlessly against the blue sky. All these sights and sounds are the signature of something unseen — the atmosphere of the Earth, the blanket of air that protects us and supports all the life around us.

How do we know the air is there? We can’t see it. All of these observations, infer the existence of the air by recognizing its influence on other things. If we want to measure the air directly, to detect it, then we need to construct controlled experiments where we understand the physical effect of the air and how it interacts with the experiment we design to elucidate its presence. Consider a simple experiment you can do right at home.

An experiment to convince yourself air exists. (TopL) If you just dip a straw directly in water and lift it out, then (TopR) all the water runs out. (LowerL) If instead you put your finger over the straw before dipping it, then (LowerR) no water gets in the straw. Something invisible got in the way — air!

Take a drinking straw and a glass of water.  Dip the straw in the water, then place your thumb over the top of the straw, and remove it from the water.  If you take your thumb off the straw, you find that you had trapped some water in the straw.  Now do a slightly different experiment. Put your thumb over the end of the straw first, then put it in the water. If you take the straw out of the water and remove your thumb, you find that there is no water in the straw!  Why didn’t water go in the straw? There must have been something in the way, something invisible you couldn’t see. It is, of course, the air. This seems completely obvious to us now, thinking about it with 21st century brains, but two millenia ago, when we were just beginning to speculate on the nature of the world, this was a remarkable and marvelous observation of the world.

Today, astronomers find themselves in a similar brain loop with respect to gravity. One can “measure the force of gravity” through experiment. But when Einstein developed general relativity, he did away with gravitational forces in favor of motion on the curvature of spacetime. We can use this idea to describe everything we see in Newtonian gravity — objects freely falling to the ground, orbits of astrophysical bodies, and the weightlessness of astronauts in space. There have been exquisite tests of general relativity confirming its unique predictions beyond Newtonian gravity, and we rely on it every single day.

But is there a way to directly measure spacetime? Can we confirm that gravity is no more than the curvature of spacetime itself?  This is a question that has occupied the minds of gravitational physicists for a century now, and many ideas have been proposed and successfully carried out.

The most ambitious idea to directly measure spacetime curvature was first proposed by Einstein himself, and has taken a century to come to fruition. One of the motivations to develop general relativity was famously to incorporate into gravitational theory the fact that there is an ultimate speed limit in the Cosmos. If the gravitational field changes (for instance, due to the dynamical motion of large, massive objects like stars), that information must propagate to distant observers at the speed of light or less. If gravity is no more than the curvature of spacetime, then changes in the gravitational field must must be encoded in changing spacetime curvature that propagates from one place to another. We call such changes gravitational waves.

The opening pages of Einstein’s first two papers on gravitational waves in 1916 (L) and 1918 (R).

If you want to build an experiment to detect an effect in Nature, you need a way to interact with the phenomenon that you can unambiguously associate with the effect. For the first 40 years after Einstein proposed the idea of gravitational waves, physicists were vexed by the detection question because they were confused as to whether the phenomenon existed at all!  The problem, we now know, was our inexperience with thinking about spacetime.

The International Prototype Kilogram (IPK).

Scientists spend their lives quantifying the world, describing it precisely and carefully without ambiguity, as much as is possible. To this end, we use numbers, and so need a way of agreeing on what certain numbers mean. For example, we measure mass using “kilograms.” What’s a kilogram? It is the mass of a reference body, made of iridium (10%) and platinum (90%), called the “International Prototype Kilogram” (IPK). The IPK, and six sister copies, are stored at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris, France. Scientists around the world agree that the IPK is the kilogram, and can base numbers off of it. Nature doesn’t care what the IPK is; the Sun certainly has a mass, expressible in kilograms, but it doesn’t care one whit what the IPK is. The kilogram is something humans invented to quantify and express their knowledge of the Cosmos in a way other humans could understand.

Example coordinates that can be used to describe the screen or paper you are reading this on. They are all different because humans invented them, not Nature. They are not intrinsic to the surface they are describing, though they are often chosen to reflect underlying shapes of the surface.

In a similar way, when spacetime physicists describe spacetime, we have to have a way of identifying locations in spacetime, so we make up coordinates. Like the kilogram, coordinates are something we humans create to enable us to talk with each other; Nature cares nothing, Nature knows nothing about coordinates. But sometimes we get so used to think about Nature in terms of coordinates, that we begin to ascribe physical importance to them! This was the case during the early decades of thinking about gravitational waves. Physicists were confused about whether or not the coordinates were waving back and forth, or if spacetime itself was waving back and forth.  Arthur Eddington, who had led the 1919 Eclipse Expedition to measure general relativity’s prediction of the deflection of starlight, famously had convinced himself that the waves were not real, but only an artifact of the coordinates.

At the poles of the globe, all the lines of longitude come together, and there is no well defined value. There is nothing wrong with the sphere; the coordinates that humans invented are not well suited there!

Sometimes coordinates behave badly, giving results that might seem wrong or unphysical. For instance, you can see one example of badly behaving coordinates at the top of a sphere — if you are standing on the North Pole of the Earth, what is your longitude? You can’t tell! Longitude is a badly behaving coordinate there! There is nothing wrong with the sphere, only our coordinates.

And so it was with spacetime. In the early 1930s, Einstein and a collaborator, Nathan Rosen, had discovered a gravitational wave solution that appeared unphysical and claimed this as a proof that gravitational waves did not exist. Their result was later shown to be coordinates behaving badly, and Einstein pivoted away from denying gravitational waves exist, though Rosen never did.

The argument of the reality of the waves persisted for decades; in the end, the questions were resolved by a brilliant deduction about how to measure gravitational waves. As with all things in science, the road to understanding is a slow and steady plod, ultimately culminating in a moment of  understanding. In the early 1950s, our thinking was progressing rapidly (or so we know now, with 20/20 hindsight). The watershed came in January of 1957 at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at a now famous conference known as “The Role of Gravitation in Physics.” There were 44 attendees who had gathered to discuss and ponder the state of gravitational physics. It was barely 19 months after Einstein’s death, and the question of the existence of gravitational waves had not yet been resolved.

The community had slowly been converging on an important and central issue in experimental physics: if you want to detect something in Nature, then you have to know what the phenomenon does to the world around it. You then need to design an experiment that focuses on that effect, isolating it in some unambiguous way. At the Chapel Hill Conference, the realization of what to do was finally put forward by Felix Pirani. Pirani had settled on the notion that an observable effect of a passing gravitational wave is the undulating separation between two test masses in space (something gravitational physicists called “geodesic deviation” or “tidal deviation”). This idea hearkens back to the idea that the trajectories of particles is a way to measure the underlying shape of gravity, which was one of the original notions we had about thinking of gravity in the context of curvature.

The Sticky Bead argument was a thought experiment that convinced physicists gravitational waves were real and could carry energy. (TOP) Imagine two beads on a smooth rod. A small amount of friction keeps the beads from sliding freely. (BOTTOM) When a gravitational wave passes by, it pushes the beads apart. The friction stops the motion of the beads, heating the rod up. Measuring the heat in the rod constitutes a detection of the gravitational waves, since they were the source of the energy.

Also present at the conference was Richard Feynman, by then a professor at the California Institute of Technology. Feynman took Pirani’s notion and extended it into what we now call “the sticky bead argument.” He imagined a smooth rod with two beads on it. The beads were a little bit sticky, unable to slide along the rod without being pushed. When the motion of the beads was analyzed under the influence of gravitational waves, they moved back and forth, but their motion was arrested by the friction between the beads and the rod. Friction is a dissipative force, and causes the rod to heat up, just like your hands do if you rub them together. In the sticky bead case, what is the origin of the heat? The heat energy originated from the gravitational waves and was deposited in the system by the motion of the beads.

This idea was picked up by Herman Bondi, who expanded the idea, fleshing it out and publishing it in one of the leading scientific journals of the day. As a result, Bondi is generally credited with this argument.

(L) Richard Feynman (C) Hermann Bondi (R) Joseph Weber

Confirming that the beads move validated the idea that gravitational waves not only carry energy, but can deposit it in systems they interact with. This was the genesis of the notion that an observational programme to detect them could be mounted.  That challenge would be taken up by another person present at the Chapel Hill conference, named Joseph Weber. Weber had spent the previous academic year on sabbatical, studying gravitational waves at Princeton, and left Chapel Hill inspired to begin a serious search. Weber’s entrance to gravitational wave astronomy happened in the early 1960s with the introduction of the first gravitational wave bar detector.  This was the foundation that led to the great experimental gravitational wave experiments of today; we will start our story there in our next chat.

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I am indebted to my colleague Peter Saulson (Syracuse) who first made me aware of Pirani’s talk at the 1957 Chapel Hill Conference. That Conference is part of the folklore if our discipline, though details are often glossed over usually going directly to the Bondi Bead story. I am also indebted to Carl Sagan, who introduced me to the idea that one can detect the air with water experiments (in “The Backbone of Night,” episode 7 of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage).

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This post is part of an ongoing series written for the General Relativity Centennial, celebrating 100 years of gravity (1915-2015).  You can find the first post in the series, with links to the successive posts in this series here: http://wp.me/p19G0g-ru.