billionth-of-a-metre accuracy
Isn't that a nanometer ?
Nanometer accuracy a million clicks away ? In space ?
Count my mind boggled.
LISA Pathfinder drops its gravity-wave-finding golden boxes
Its publicity thunder stolen by last week's announcement that the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-wave Observatory has seen the signal of the waves, the European Space Agency's LISA Pathfinder has passed what the agency calls a “major milestone”. The LISA – Laser Interferometer Space Antenna – Pathfinder is a proof-of- …
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Thursday 18th February 2016 07:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: billionth-of-a-metre accuracy
Compared to the accuracy level of LIGO - 10^-18 meters or nine orders of magnitude better - I'm not sure if this will be more accurate if it is really "only" accurate to 10^-9 meters.
Yeah, million km arms beats LIGO's 4km (which is actually 600 km since it is reflected back and forth 75 times) but it doesn't seem like it is enough to overcome LIGO's massive sensitivity advantage. Unless the larger arms have a much bigger effect i.e. 10x longer arms = 1000x greater sensitivity since gravity waves are traveling through three dimensions. Anyone know how the math works out on this comparison?
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Thursday 18th February 2016 21:19 GMT Grikath
Re: billionth-of-a-metre accuracy @ DougS
This is just the test setup.. The full setup will use an orbital triangle with arms of rather impressive length, with a verymuch higher resolution than anything we could possibly hope to build on earth.
Because.. well... earth isn't big enough for starters.
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Thursday 18th February 2016 07:35 GMT Captain DaFt
You missed one
"First, it was planned and built long before last year's LIGO data collection run that led to last week's announcement, and launched in December 2015; second, replication matters in science."
Third - Now that we can detect them, it's time to see what we can detect with them. We have just realised it's possible to "see" with a whole new window to the universe.
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Thursday 18th February 2016 13:53 GMT Cuddles
Re: Major omission in the article
"LISA Pathfinder is designed to detect gravitational waves in a different frequency range to the ones detected by LIGO."
Beat me to it. Asking what the point of LISA is now we have LIGO is like asking what the point of building radio telescopes is when we can already see visible light, or what the point of sonar is when we have ears. Just because they happen to look at the same kind of waves doesn't mean they're trying to do exactly the same thing.
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Thursday 18th February 2016 20:16 GMT Robert Helpmann??
Re: Major omission in the article
In all of the interviews I listened to concerning the confirmation of gravity waves, the boffins invariably pointed out that this was the beginning of an entire new method for exploring the universe. One visible light telescope wasn't considered "enough" nor were the first telescopes designed to detect radio waves or x-rays. Too, one major advantage of gravity wave detectors is they can "see" farther back in time than electromagnetic radiation will allow. This is a really good start, but it is just a start.
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Thursday 18th February 2016 09:22 GMT Scott Broukell
Year: 2095
(in a nasal, echoey, crackley voice) - 'We apologize for the delay of the 07:50 time-warp tunneling service from East Cheam to the Large Magellanic Cloud this morning, this is due to the wrong frequency gravitational waves permeating the space-time continuum around Clapham and Tooting.'
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Thursday 18th February 2016 10:06 GMT PaulAb
GOLD....PLATINUM!!!!
At the very least, this will divert the attentions of thieves nicking copper cable of the rail/motorway systems.
This could start a whole new space race of Shell suited astronauts attempting to get into space in 1975 Transit vans with catapult launch systems. Expect the first attempts soon (As soon as they have nicked enough rubber bands for the launch system and visited Macburger for supplies).
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Thursday 18th February 2016 12:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re. alien SPAM
"Enlarge your pseudopods with this One Weird Trick"
"Has your black hole been involved in a collision that wasn't your fault?"
"Send 5 cubic metres of Element 93 to this star system, and get 5000 by the next galactic rotation"
"Files locked? Pay us 50,000 credits and we will unlock them for you"
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Friday 19th February 2016 03:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re. LISA
Maybe they can sell it as a way to locate foreign nuclear submarines? :-)
I had an intriguing idea about detecting a SCRAM on a reactor by listening out for a specific set of neutrino signatures but detecting mass displacement directly will also work.
The sticking point is that my modified detector uses materials not found in nature, but so far it has attracted some interest.
See paper soon to be published in "Scientific American".
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Friday 19th February 2016 12:09 GMT Sirius Lee
Yes, replication matters
I was staggered to read in the detailed article published on arxiv (http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1602/1602.03837.pdf) that the claim to have found gravitational waves is based on one observation. The run was conducted when the observation occurred happened when German and Japanese devices that also aim to find these waves were not operational.
I'm sure the researchers involved have done an excellent job of eliminating other possible explanations but, really, one observation?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
