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New Distributed Project Seeks Gravity Waves
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Feb 19, 2005 04:19 PM
from the jeff-spicolli-knows-where-they're-at dept.
from the jeff-spicolli-knows-where-they're-at dept.
fenimor writes "Much like the popular SETI@Home distributed computing project that searches radio telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial life, the new Einstein@Home will search for gravitational waves in data collected by U.S. and European gravitational wave detectors. Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916, but only now has technology reached the point that scientists hope to detect them directly."
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What do gravity waves tell us? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What do gravity waves tell us? (Score:5, Informative)
It would be another confirmation of Einstein's theory. Some more background here [wikipedia.org].
And here's some about a recent satellite [wikipedia.org] also hoping to establish the existence of gravity waves.
Re:What do gravity waves tell us? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This. (Score:3, Informative)
2) GR does not make any prediction such as
Re:What do gravity waves tell us? (Score:5, Informative)
If you can detect primordial gravity waves from the very early universe(harder!), you now have an indication that inflation (rapid expansion) of the universe is a reasonable cosmological model rather than its current somewhat ad hoc status. It nicely explains away some problems with simpler models, but no real direct test has been performed to show that it happened.
Re:What do gravity waves tell us? (Score:5, Interesting)
First, the direct detection of gravitational waves would confirm certain aspects of the theory of general relativity, as other posters have noted.
Second, gravitational wave detectors will provide us with a new window to the universe. Ordinary stars emit mostly visible light, so ordinary optical telescopes are well suited to their study. Cold clouds of interstellar gas emit mostly radio waves, so radio telescopes are the best choice to study them. We know of certain objects --- relatively uncommon ones -- which ought to produce a good deal of gravitational radiation: very massive objects moving very quickly, such as pairs of black holes or neutron stars orbiting around each other at small distances. Gravitational wave detectors will allow astronomers to study the properties of these objects more precisely than we can with ordinary telescopes (since they do not emit much electromagnetic radiation).
Finally, it is possible (though I suspect unlikely) that the universe may contain a whole class (or classes) of objects which are currently unknown to us, but which will appear as strong sources of gravitational radiation. Almost every time astronomers have added a new type of telescope to their toolkit, they have stumbled across previously unknown phenomena. The first gamma-ray telescopes, for example, revealed gamma-ray bursts, which were completely undetected (and unexpected) by other means in the late sixties and early seventies.
One last note: LIGO and other gravitational wave detectors provide very poor angular resolution, compared to ordinary optical telescopes. They will tell us something like "a source of gravitational waves is over there, about 10 degrees above the horizon at 5 degrees south of East." The "error circle" for a typical detection will be a few degrees in size. It may be quite a challenge for astronomers to identify the optical counterpart to a new source of gravitational waves, since there will usually be thousands to millions of optical sources within the error box of a gravitational wave detection.
Re:What do gravity waves tell us? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What do gravity waves tell us? (Score:3, Informative)
Bah humbug. (Score:4, Interesting)
Relevant link (Score:5, Informative)
Posting as AC to avoid karma whoring.
Kind of worries me. (Score:3, Funny)
LIGO project (Score:4, Informative)
Re:LIGO project (Score:3, Informative)
The coolest thing about this project is: (Score:3, Informative)
The BOINC [berkeley.edu] versions of Seti@Home and Climateprediction are similar.
You can attach to all of them and have the client devide your CPU time any way you want.
BOINC also has a folding client (predictor@home), but there's no eye candy.
They Claim To "Own" The Data (Score:5, Insightful)
They also make no mention of license terms or client source availability.
Re:They Claim To "Own" The Data (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ARGH (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not to push this down... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not to push this down... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not to push this down... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Anti-Gravity Engine? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Anti-Gravity Engine? (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a lot of moderators out there that don't understand just what a Troll is. They think that if they don't agree with somebody's opinions, that makes the poster a Troll, no matter how poli
Re:Serious question. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:observed first in 70s experiment? (Score:3, Interesting)
The "something else" that was observed was most likely to be big ordinary vibrations which the experiments were trying to subtract to leave a small signal.
Re:Its a big question... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have been doing seti for nearly since it started, currently standing at 99.339% in overall rankings.
I do this mainly because my sci-fi reading goes all the way back to E.E. (Doc) Smith, which some of you might consider as the McGuffies Readers of the day and which is circa 60+ years back up the log now. One always hopes that his machine might be the one to raise its hand and holler, Hey Teach, I hear something.
But realisticly, after 5+ years, and the results of nearly 6 million people, coupled with the limited sky view of Aricebo, does tend to tell you after a while that the chances are someplace between point double ought zip and absolutely nothing. The data, I think, has been analysed several times by now, with no really outstanding candidate signals haveing been detected. Going over that same limited band of the sky, at the same limited band of frequencies, is beginning to grow old.
This gravity wave project is intrigueing, but I don't seem to be able to dl the BOINC client, mime type error I think at the BOINC site.
As far as the parent posters suggestion that we should be working on the cancer project, sorry but I'm enough of an open source advocate that my cycles will not be used for such a project wherein the output data is owned by some commercial entity, who if they get lucky will profit immensely from any discoveries so made. Likewise for the folding@home project. If the results are not to be public knowledge, able to benefit all manner of life, then screw 'em just like they'll screw me at the prescription counter for the product that may result.
There is, I would hope, a new way of doing such research that will meet these ideas, doing it openly, with the results being unencumbered by patents, and the products so developed then sold on the open market (but regulated by the FDA of course) by the time honored tradition of he who can do it the best, or cheapest, being the marketplace winner, with open competition between the makers for our dollars. The FDA's job then is like the agriculture dept folks, to make sure the process is being done by the proper methods, that being by way of testing the efficiency, and safety of the product at doing what it is being sold for.
But to bring that about, you are all I trust, aware that we will have to declare a Bill Shakespear day as an annual holiday.
The chances of that actually happening are also somewhere between point double ought zip and nothing in our present society.
Then, and only then, would I personally be interested in doing what amounts to free data processing for a commercially profitable entity.
Now, if they want to buy my cpu time at a rate that helps me pay the energy bill to run these machines, and a piece of the action (no RIAA bookkeeping to be allowed here folks, its a piece of the gross sales only, the internal expenses for that Lamborgini and the sexytary who wants a quarter of a mill just to have your baby are yours to control) then I might consider learning a different tune.
But I sure wouldn't sleep any better.
Now, if they would fix the mime type on the linux binary of BOINC, I'd dl it and take a look.
Cheers, Gene