#interferometer

22nd October 2021 ||

12:15: studying for the GRE while running simulations.

5 Facts We Can Learn If LIGO Detects Merging Neutron Stars

“We have already entered a new age in astronomy, where we're not just using telescopes, but interferometers. We're not just using light, but gravitational waves, to view and understand the Universe. If merging neutron stars reveal themselves to LIGO, even if the events are rare and the detection rate is low, it's means we'll have crossed that next frontier. The gravitational sky and the light-based sky will no longer be strangers to one another. Instead, we'll be one step closer to understanding how the most extreme objects in the Universe actually work, and we'll have a window into our cosmos that no human has ever had before.”

Two years ago, advanced LIGO turned on, and in that brief time, it’s already revealed a number of gravitational wave events. All of them, to no one’s surprise, have been merging black holes, since those are the easiest class of events for LIGO to detect. But beyond black holes, LIGO should also be sensitive to merging neutron stars. Even though the range over which LIGO can see them is much smaller, if there are enough neutron star-neutron star mergers happening, we might have a chance. A little over a week ago, a rumor broke that LIGO may have seen one, which would be a phenomenal occurrence. Not only would we have a new type of event that we detected in gravitational waves, we would, for the first time, have the capability of correlating the gravitational and electromagnetic skies. Astronomy, for the first time ever, could view the very same object in gravitational waves and through telescopes.

The Failed Experiment That Changed The World

“ This null result — the fact that there was no luminiferous aether — was actually a huge advance for modern science, as it meant that light must have been inherently different from all other waves that we knew of. The resolution came 18 years later, when Einstein’s theory of special relativity came along. And with it, we gained the recognition that the speed of light was a universal constant in all reference frames, that there was no absolute space or absolute time, and — finally — that light needed nothing more than space and time to travel through. ”

In the 1880s, it was clear that something was wrong with Newton’s formulation of the Universe. Gravitation didn’t explain everything, objects behaved bizarrely close to the speed of light, and light was exhibiting wave-like properties. But surely, even if it were a wave, it required a medium to travel through, just like all other waves? That was the standard thinking, and the genius of Albert A. Michelson was put to work to test it. Because, he reasoned, the Earth was moving around the Sun, the speed of light should get a boost in that forward direction, and then have to fight that boost on the return trip. The perpendicular direction, on the other hand, would be unaffected. This motion of light should be detectable in the form of interferometry, where light was split into two perpendicular components, sent on a journey, reflected, and then recombined.