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The Night Sky Podcast | Gravitational Waves
Hello, and thank you for listening to this episode of the night sky podcast. My name is Billy Newman. And I’m Marina Hansen. And we’re here today to finally come back from our long hiatus. We’ve been on vacation. Hey, pretty good reason to be gone. Though we believe in everybody. Yeah. Without an update on the night sky above us for for now two weeks. Oh, man, shoot. Sorry. Everything’s changed. So one person he listened. Last time we were talking about you’re talking about? Oh, yeah, there’s been so many discoveries since last time your gravitational waves have been verified. They’ve been projected before but now they’ve been verified, I guess I suppose. They say the math is strong. I’ll let the scientific community that that all. But But yeah, they say that they found what was it like a 26. And ours, I think it was 26 and 34. solar mass, black hole orbiting each other, came closer and closer kind of spiraling in on their same like point. And then they finally merged together, when the two giant black holes a solar mass, like we talked about before, is the size of our Sun. So one sun, around Earth is one solar mass. So these black holes were each 30 solar masses, so 30 times more massive than the mass of the sun. And these two black holes smiled at each other. And it’s at this rate, I think, predicted in Einstein’s theory of special relativity, where it kind of it kind of matches a pattern of how gravitational bodies will orbit around each other, and then collide with each other. And so when these two bodies collided with each other, there was an X, I think there was, if you think of E equals MC squared as energy equals mass times the velocity of light squared, then what that would mean is that when mass is accelerated to a certain point, it turns in energy. That’s what happened in this event, these 230 solar mass, black holes colliding with each other, it released three solar masses, that’s three times the whole mass of our Sun, from mass into energy out into space. And I think this is one of like, the largest or the most energetic events that we’ve been able to record in cosmology is really big. Yeah, well, yeah, or not, not in priority, but in amount of energy that’s exchanged at a single point that’s verifiable. And so that’s, I think, what the type of thing that this, this type of observe observatory was looking for, was something to collect these gravitational waves. So it’s a really cool story, they’ve kind of figured that out. I think that was back in September, that they made the observations and then now and was it early, or mid February, that’s when they kind of announced it probably won’t make a lot of changes for any daily use, but it will change a lot of the astronomical. Well, I’d say like, part of the study of astronomy going forward in the next 50 or 75, to 100 years, you know, it’s because now we can make gravitational telescopes, we can make these tools that are able to observe gravity waves out in space. And this is just the first time that we’ve done it, this was an observation of one of the most strong signals or strong events that we’d be able to gravitationally pick up. And so now from here, over the next several generations of this technology, they’re going to be able to refine it so much more that they’re going to be able to pick up much more subtle gravitational waves. And once they’re able to do this, or once they’re able to, let’s say, now that it’s proven put this type of technology out into space, and then make that expanse really vast, we’re going to be able to refine details of these gravitational waves to a much smaller resolution. And that’s going to give scientists and cosmologists and these new gravitational wave astronomers, more tools to look into the universe, and especially to look into the early stages of the universe forming, which is going to be really exciting. I think this event that they observed was one and a half billion light years away. They say, it’s not triangulated. So they don’t know exactly where in space, this event took place. But they say that it would be out somewhere past the Magellanic Cloud, if we were to kind of think about it in the sphere of the sky that’s in the southern hemisphere. Pretty cool stuff. Pretty cool. So let’s say okay, the coolest thing, so it’s kind of up to us to sort of wrap your head around what it means what are they observing what is the gravitational wave, but this ripple from this event that happened one and a half billion years ago, sent a wave in Gravity through spacetime across the universe, and it adjusted the width of the Milky Way galaxy by the width of your thumb. Oh,
yeah, that’s so in the room. There’s any kind of cute In perceptible distance, there’s no there’s no change. There’s like an atom’s with a change. For us experiencing it here on Earth. That’s why we didn’t see any kind of crazy, you know, thing happen. There’s no kind of observable event, you with something that’s probably one of the strongest events observable for us, you know, out in outer space, these collisions of black holes. But, but yeah, that that wave, I think stretched, and then shrunk the Galaxy by the width of a thumb. So that’s like, 100 light years across, you see me, I realized, I think it’s 100,000 light years across the Milky Way galaxy. And that kind of wiggled by an inch. Yeah, see gravitational wave,
you saying that it, it got a space in it. That was the width of a thumb. And then it got closer together.
You know, it’s really strange, it warped space time. So there was no, there’s no physical space that changed. But that was complicated. Yeah, that the, that the, the fabric between the atoms had flexed outward, and perceivable. To us, as beings that don’t have a capability of perceiving something like that the change in our space time, we’re not able to really do that we perceive because it says we’re in it, we perceive time to be pretty constant. But if we were outside of that, we could see that the fabric of it the size of it stretched out an inch, and then came back together. So if we think of the expanding universe, it’s the expansion of space time, it’s traveling outward. So the physical distance between, between proton proton in an atom is, is expanding outward, and the size of those atoms are expanding outward. And it’s just it’s like space, time is expanding. It’s just sort of all expanding together. But in this situation, just this wave came through, like we think of a wave on a beach, it rolled through. And like when we were in the waves in the ocean a few weeks ago, we you’d kind of be in the wave, it would move through, but then it would go back to the status of the water before wave, right? So the wave similarly came through, I didn’t displace anything, or move anything permanently. But it just just stay away. And it’s going through, yes, stretch it by some amount, and then had it come back together. But that’s the amount of distortion that was sent across. From that gravitational wave. And gravitational waves. The reason that it’s important to us is that it was the thing that was one of the last things to be identified, or how would that be one of the last items in Einstein’s theory of special relativity that was yet to be on will yet to be proven? So this item of gravitational waves was really just been theoretical, up until this point, because it had not been, there been no technology developed to make that an observable phenomena, these gravitational waves, so it’s really this huge feat of engineering that we’re even at a place where we can do that now.
Yeah. It’s really pretty incredible, is it? So now that they’ve officially, I guess, said that that happened, they’re gonna be working on telescopes now, or newer telescopes that can detect?
Yeah, there’s, so there’s two locations right now. And these were all part of a scientific grant to look for a theoretical piece of science that no one believed even existed. Even Einstein, I think kind of sort of tried to retract this idea during his life, that there is that there was even the possibility of observing these gravitational waves, they were able to make this the system to do that. There’s, it’s a gravitational wave Observatory, really interesting stuff, I won’t get into exactly how they do it. But it’s a Laser Interferometer. And it uses like a period of an amount of time to bounce a laser beam back and forth. And if a gravitational wave goes through there and stretches space time out, then the wave of light takes longer than the speed of light to go all the way down to the end and then back. And so they’re measuring that amount of time, that period, really, really accurately. And then when this happened, the way it came through, it stretched spacetime over that distance. And then the wave didn’t come back at the right time. That means that there was a measurable gravitational wave that passed through that space time, that stretched that tube of the observatory. And that’s what they recorded. They did this in two locations, all part of the same. I don’t know, observational? Well, there’s two observatories, they both get recordings and then they match that data together, so that they can do noise cancellation, to drop out any of the disturbances that be localized to the earth. So if there’s an earthquake in one, you could kind of measure that against whatever the other one would pick up. And you can cancel that signal out. Okay. Yeah, that’s cool stuff. So now that it’s been proven, now this really experimental thing that cost billions of dollars to get set up for the first time has now been proven, it’s going to be this huge expansion into the scientific community, where they’re going to be building a lot more of these tools to do to the gravitational wave observations. That’s really cool. It’s gonna be really exciting. Yeah, I’m really glad that that it came through, we’re gonna see a huge expanse in the field of cosmology in our lifetime. And now that this is something that’s out there, that people well that, that astronomers will be able to do research on, it’s gonna be interesting to find out, I guess, what kind of what kind of new discoveries kind of come from this? Yeah, time to vest, but it’d be really cool.
Yeah, it’ll be really neat to see what new things are figuring out? Yeah. Be a lot of fun. And so what are the names of the observatories that proved this?
Yeah. So like, we I think I mentioned that there are two observatories that were picking this up, and they were doing noise cancellation against each other, to try and refine the signal, which is part of how the technology works that they’re using. And so the, the installation is called Lego. It’s the Laser Interferometer gravitational wave observatory. It’s an acronym. And there’s two installation sites right now. They’re both in America, I think they’re going to expand soon out from that, because there’s going to be an advantage if there were at least if there are more than two, because right now with two, they’re not able to triangulate the position of a signal that they get. And so once they’re able to triangulate things, that question that we had a few minutes ago, when we were talking about where this event, this, this black hole collision took place in the universe, we’d be able to better pinpoint that answer if we have three of them, because we’ll be able to triangulate that signal. So with the two of them, we’re only able to tell right now that they’re out in the Magellanic Cloud. So the two observatories that exist, one of them is in Washington State, and one of them is in Arkansas. Right now, it’s cool, I think the best place for them to be would be off the earth entirely. So same as like the Hubble telescope. When we started doing optical observations of space above us, we use the telescope here on Earth, the really ultimately, the best, highest resolution way that we can make observations of the universe was by putting that telescope outside the gravity worldview of the earth, and putting it out into space, where there wouldn’t be any disturbance from light pollution or atmosphere or vibration. And they could put this telescope up, make it perfectly still and have it take these really long exposures, or long periods of light collecting to get these images or to get this resolution of data so that they can look out so deeply in space, really cool how they’re able to do that, with optical telescopes. I think, in our lifetime over the next 3040 years, if this seems like a promising field of science, we’re going to see that expand out into into Laser Interferometer gravitational wave observatories that are put out into space as as like long satellites, or satellites that communicate to each other and send a pulse back and forth, or send a laser back and forth to each other, and then try and pick up that same period of time as the technology and algorithms for this get a lot better be really cool. Oh, it’d be really cool. Yeah. Yeah, it would be really neat. So I think right now, since they have proven that there are gravitational waves, there is now funding made available for third whygo installment to I think, be put into somewhere in the US probably take another 10 years for that installation to go online. I bet. We might see others like this come up from from other educational institutions around the world. Like we might see something from CERN or we might see something from, you know, just from some other installation that would want to build something like this. Now that it’s a provable scientifically researchable field of cosmology be really cool. It’s going to be one of the most exciting things that happens for for this next century of scientific discovery. I think this is probably one of the groundbreaking things. That’ll be part of learning about gravity learning about that part of early universal history. be interesting.
Yeah, it’ll be really interesting.
Yeah. Well, I’m glad we got to talk about it a little bit. And I want to say on behalf of Marina Hanson, thank you very much everyone for listening to this episode of the night sky podcast.