[HN Gopher] Galaxy-Size Gravitational-Wave Detector Hints at Exo...
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Galaxy-Size Gravitational-Wave Detector Hints at Exotic Physics
Author : pseudolus
Score : 115 points
Date : 2021-02-05 15:05 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| tengbretson wrote:
| I just think that if there were a wave detector the size of a
| galaxy I'd have probably seen it by now, right?
| ccapo wrote:
| The detector could just _be_ the entire galaxy, it doesn 't
| have to be an artificial construct. To your question, you have
| already seen it, hiding in plain sight.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| Writing copy in the English language is a dying art.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I believe you misinterpret the article. Physicists on earth are
| using small timing fluctuations in the radiation arriving from
| multiple far-flung pulsars to try and detect gravitational
| waves. This is what is meant by a galaxy-sized gravitational
| wave detector.
| spekcular wrote:
| It was a joke.
| btilly wrote:
| Yes, it was. And that is a reason to downvote.
|
| People aren't on Hacker News for the jokes, and a
| significant fraction don't like seeing threads hijacked by
| silliness. We've all seen Reddit, and are choosing not to
| be there for a reason.
|
| That's not to say that you can't get away with jokes here.
| But the bar for them to work is _very_ high.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Space is awfully big though - the actual structure presumably
| would be detectable with hindsight but these galaxies are an
| unbelievably long way away and a detector would presumably be
| thin on that scale.
| michael_j_ward wrote:
| Personally, i found this hilarious, so I don't understand why
| you're being downvoted
| _underfl0w_ wrote:
| Didn't downvote so can't be 100% certain, but it may be
| related to the fact that this isn't Reddit.
| tengbretson wrote:
| They don't all land, I guess.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| We do get people that stupid here occasionally, so I didn't
| read it as a joke. Poe's law, etc. Ed: FWIW, I didn't
| downvote.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| For those who want a bit more details in a fairly accessible
| format there was a recent and IMHO interesting talk[1] at
| Perimeter Institute about these results from one of the founders
| of NANOGrav.
|
| The NANOGrav collaboration behind these results was using the
| Arecibo telescope as one of their primary data sources. Due to
| the extremely low frequencies involved, they relied on data over
| many years to reduce noise. Here's what they said before it fell
| apart[2]:
|
| _Many of these pulsars can be timed only with Arecibo thanks to
| its incredible sensitivity. NANOGrav's most recent analyses show
| that a detection of gravitational waves is likely imminent. Any
| gap longer than several months in our 16 years of data will
| impede our ability to characterize the low-frequency
| gravitational-wave universe and carry out the associated multi-
| messenger science. It will also likely add systematics to our
| datasets that will make them more difficult to model. If Arecibo
| wasn't repaired, its loss would be a disaster for both US
| gravitational-wave and radio astronomy._
|
| They made a follow-up statement after the loss[3], so it's not a
| fatal blow but definitely a tough loss:
|
| _While our future sensitivity to gravitational waves will
| decrease without Arecibo, legacy Arecibo observations will anchor
| combined future datasets which will be integral to opening this
| new window on the universe at low frequency gravitational waves
| and to gleaning insights into how galaxies form and evolve._
|
| [1]: http://pirsa.org/20100068
|
| [2]:
| http://nanograv.org/announcement,/press/2020/08/19/Arecibo.h...
|
| [3]:
| http://nanograv.org/announcement,/press/2020/12/02/Arecibo.h...
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Fascinating, particularly the analysis of pulsar signals for
| meta-phenomena.
|
| I bet gravitational waves aren't the only thing we'll learn to
| detect from pulsars.
| MeteorMarc wrote:
| Although the article reads as sensational, it is actually based
| on three recently accepted papers in Physical Review Letters. It
| also gives some insight into several research groups wanting to
| claim being the first having seen evidence for new physics, be it
| from sparse observational data.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Last September, the collaboration posted a paper on the
| preprint server arXiv.org, which hosts scientific articles that
| have yet to go through peer review, showing that its monitored
| pulsars all displayed similar blips. (The paper has since been
| peer-reviewed and published.)_ "
|
| Yeah. One would thought they would lead with the peer-reviewed
| publications rather than preprints.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| The arxiv is freely accessible, the journal link isn't.
| m-watson wrote:
| There is a fourth now
| https://twitter.com/PhysRevLett/status/1354866900036153352 and
| a write up in Physics (The more casual write ups at APS about
| major topics): https://physics.aps.org/articles/v14/15
|
| The actual article links:
|
| [1]-
| https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...
|
| [2] -
| https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...
|
| [3] -
| https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...
|
| [4] -
| https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.12...
| titanomachy wrote:
| I actually thought the article, and the physicists it quoted,
| did a pretty good job of balancing excitement with cautious
| skepticism.
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