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Space Science News Technology

LIGO Will Make Gravitational Waves Announcement on Thursday 120

StartsWithABang writes: When we look out into the Universe, we normally gain information about it by gathering light of various wavelengths. However, there are other possibilities for astronomy, including by looking for the neutrinos emitted by astrophysical sources - first detected in the supernova explosion of 1987 - and in the gravitational waves emitted by accelerating masses. These ripples in the fabric of space were theorized back in the early days of Einstein's General Relativity, and experiments to detect them have been ongoing since the 1960s. However, in September of 2015, Advanced LIGO came online, and it was the first gravitational wave observatory that was expected to detect a real gravitational wave signal. The press conference on Thursday is where the collaboration will make their official announcement, and in the meantime, here's an explainer of what gravitational waves are, what Advanced LIGO can teach us, and how.
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LIGO Will Make Gravitational Waves Announcement on Thursday

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09, 2016 @02:15PM (#51472131)

    "We expect to find some any day now."

    • by RenderSeven ( 938535 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2016 @02:40PM (#51472389)
      For an announcement, yes. But this was an announcement for an announcement, like a trailer, so the reveal is probably bigger. And no spoilers please. Clearly the NSF and DOE want the VIP's at LIGO in LA, WA and MIT want to keep the PC on the QT, 'cause if it leaks to CNN and MSNBC the UK and EU might cut the GWIC budget PDQ for AIGO and GEO and the VC's would go MIA. And then we'd all be put on KP.
    • Dean Kamen will announce the new levitating Segway. It's going to change the urban landscape forever.

      Actually it turns out they have identified a concentrated emitter of Gravity waves. Yo Momma. She so fat.

      • The real announcement is that they studying gravity waves using a device intended to electromagnetically reduce the weight of a suspended object. IN the process they discovered a strange mold that normally takes 1 year to grow a layer had completely covered their apparatus overnight. They built a larger machine and crawled inside of it with a tank of oxygen and found themselves at next thursday. Thus they can't actually make the announcement until time catches up with them. They could go back in time t

        • If you ditch work this afternoon, and promise to do the few small things I ask you; I will in return show you the most important thing that any living organism has ever witnessed.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    wow man, like really heavy stuff!

  • Here's a thought, why not wait until Thursday for the actual announcement instead of feeding shill accounts that link to ad block un-friendly sites who have been known purveyors of malware via ads???????

  • by Anonymous Coward

    How much is Forbes/StartsWithABang paying Slashdot?

  • Here we go again (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09, 2016 @02:26PM (#51472265)

    StartsWithABang and his Forbes bullshit again. So much for new management. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

    • Re:Here we go again (Score:4, Interesting)

      by sexconker ( 1179573 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2016 @02:59PM (#51472545)

      They probably have an existing contract in place that they can't just kill off without being sued.

      • Re:Here we go again (Score:5, Informative)

        by Soulskill ( 1459 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2016 @11:29PM (#51476431)

        There's no contract. Or any communication aside from the actual submissions. If you want different astronomy/science stories on Slashdot, you have easy recourse; submit your own!

        • Plenty of people submit worthwhile things that just sit at the firehose, while plenty of shilled crap gets front paged.

          I dare you to explain how it is decided which things are front paged, including the names of the people who make the decisions.
          And I defy you to directly state that you still work for Slashdot and that advertising or other promotional deals do not affect what is posted to the front page.

          • by Soulskill ( 1459 )

            Plenty of people submit worthwhile things that just sit at the firehose, while plenty of shilled crap gets front paged.

            Unfortunately, everybody's definition of "worthwhile things" is different. If there are specific examples you'd like to discuss, I'd be happy to post my perspective on why they may or may not have been posted. I realize that submitting to Slashdot can be like screaming into the void; it's something I always wanted to change. But there are often good reasons why submissions were declined.

            Shilled stories get to the front page for a few reasons. Here's how CmdrTaco explained it to me when I joined Slashdot. Th

  • The heck with that...
  • The "news about the news" has been out there for the better part of a week. Did you really just hear about it?

    • by tnk1 ( 899206 )

      Slashdot doesn't release "scoops", really. That's not necessarily a bad thing, although it is amusing at times to see them beaten out for tech news by CNN.com. As an aggregator that relies on posting from other sites, it's always going to lag a little.

      On the other hand, perhaps that means the Slashdot needs to stop reporting on mainstream crap and return to a more specialized set of news.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09, 2016 @02:29PM (#51472293)

    Can you imagine the quality of Yo Mama's So Fat jokes that will come out of this? You don't get that kind of entertainment without spending some cash on science.

  • by Chmarr ( 18662 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2016 @02:30PM (#51472305)

    Can I have an option to just hide any articles with links to forbes.com ? That'd be really handy, thanks.

    • I wrote a grease monkey user script that nuked all the bennett haselton shit from orbit.
      Should be trivial to do the same for forbes.

      (I switched machines and browsers recently - I didn't bother to bring the bennett haselton nuker with me because as far as I know his shit has stopped.)

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Slashdot: new for nerds that can't write an userscript and prefer waiting for their corporate masters.
      Edited from some other post
      // ==UserScript==
      // @name No forbes articles
      // @description Remove forbes posts from Slashdot front page.
      // @include http://slashdot.org/*
      // @include http://.slashdot.org/*
      // @include https://slashdot.org/*
      // @include https://.slashdot.org/*
      // @exclude https://.slashdot.org/story/*
      // @exclude http://.slashdot.org/story/*
      // @grant none
      // ==/UserScript==

      var elements = doc

    • Try searching for the topic of a forbes.com article to find the references it was based on.
    • I'm beginning to believe that Forbes is the real new owner of Slashdot, and they just bought it through a front.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 09, 2016 @02:47PM (#51472445)

    http://phys.org/news/2016-02-thursday-einstein-gravitational.html

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2016 @02:55PM (#51472509)

    This "we're announcing that we'll be announcing something soon" crap, I mean.

    The first time I was really aware of it happening was with "Ginger", that silly self-balancing scooter. Then, and every time since, the announcement has been underwhelming at best. Most of the time it's a complete waste of time - so I now let these pre-announcements go in one ear and right out the other.

    We have the Internet. If something cool is announced, we'll know about it right away. Stop wasting our time - and yours - with pre-announcements about coming announcements!

    Truly we live in the future... but, unfortunately, too often this future makes Futurama look like a prescient documentary.

    • This is a press event that is being announced. You are not press, so you are not required to care, but plenty of people do.

    • It not that there are announcements that there are going to be announcements. It's that setting up a schedule to make an announcement so that the relevant people can be there to ask relevant questions is being treated as an announcement itself.

      Organizations like LIGO are not the problem; stenographers pretending to be journalists are the problem.

  • by mattventura ( 1408229 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2016 @03:06PM (#51472615) Homepage
    I thought I would be able to manipulate gravity using LEGO, but was quickly disappointed.
  • That is all.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Prior to the age of people being functionally retarded by sh!t ezines like Forbes, we called it an "explanation"

  • The Earth sucks.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • hope he get a Nobel.
  • by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Tuesday February 09, 2016 @05:18PM (#51473897) Homepage

    LIGO Will Make Gravitational Waves Announcement on Thursday

    This is all so sudden! They should have pre-announced this pre-announcement. I mean, officially.

  • The gravitational waves are also the long-sought graviton, right?
  • One of the LIGO programs is only 40 miles away, with a lot of luck the local newspaper might cover it.

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