Tag archives: gravitational waves
The firm that’s made no noise over gravitational waves
By Matin Durrani in Baltimore, Maryland, US
The exhibition hall at this year’s APS March meeting is so big that it can be hard to know who or what to see among the many companies displaying their wares or services. Fortunately, my colleague Joe Breck from IOP Publishing’s office in Philadelphia tipped me off about a great little story featuring Kepco Power Supplies, which is based in Flushing, New York.
I spoke to Mark Kupferberg, executive vice-president for power solutions at the firm, which was founded by his father and his two brothers in 1946 shortly afer the three had finished work on the Manhattan atomic-bomb project. Kepco mainly makes power supplies that convert mains AC into DC electricity, and has recently played a small but vital role in the discovery of gravitational waves, which were first predicted by Einstein 100 years ago.
Lilting to the LIGO tune, Fukushima five years on and more
By Tushna Commissariat
Looks as if LIGO’s gravitational-wave discovery is still rocking all over the world, as you can now groove to the dulcet tones of singer and physicist Tim Blais, who runs the acapellascience channel on YouTube. With some help from the Perimeter Institute in Canada, the singer has created his latest “nerd-pop” parody, titled “LIGO Feel That Space” (sung to the tune of The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face”). After you listen to the catchy tune above, take a look at this interview with Blais on the Perimeter website to find out just how he creates his songs and how he went from physicist to a viral YouTuber.
Physics versus superheroes, a cosmic landscape and a dress inspired by LIGO
By Hamish Johnston
What to do with an abandoned mine? “Turn it into a neutrino and dark-matter detector” is probably what most physicists would say. But we have lots of those already, so how about “A cosmic landscape worthy of the ancients”? That’s how the artist Charles Jencks describes the Crawick Multiverse, which is located in a former open-cast coal mine in the Scottish countryside about 50 miles south of Glasgow. The “striking landscape of distinctive landforms” includes two mounds representing the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies and a Comet Walk that uses standing stones to emulate a comet’s tail. If the photograh above is any indication, it looks like a lovely day out.
Primates and paradoxical twins in the ISS, cosmic musicals, alien advertising and more
By Tushna Commissariat
The International Space Station (ISS) usually has only the human variety of primate on board, but earlier this week a gorilla seemed to have joined the crew. If you thought that this was part of one of the hundreds of planned experiments on the ISS you would be wrong. Instead, it was crew member Scott Kelly’s birthday hijinks after his twin brother sent him the suit for his birthday as the astronaut celebrated a year in space. Kelly will return to Earth in six days’ time.
Interestingly, this is the first time NASA has sent up one half of a pair of twins into space and is studying just how life on the ISS will change Scott’s physiology from that of his twin Mark. Apart from looking at how life in space will alter everything from Scott’s DNA to his gut microbes, this is also a real-life variation of the “twin paradox” experiment where Scott will return to the planet a bit “younger” than his twin in that Scott’s clock runs a bit slower than Mark’s, thanks to the ISS’s orbital speed of 17,000 mph. After reading this, if you feel like you would like a go on the ISS, NASA is currently hiring.
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Surfing the LIGO wave, sounding out black holes and more
By Matin Durrani and Tushna Commissariat
Unless you are completely disconnected from all electronic media, the Internet and don’t read a newspaper, by now you must have heard that the LIGO Virgo collaboration has made the first ever detection of gravitational waves, spewed out by two black holes merging into one. The story made waves across the world, if you will excuse the pun, and seemed to capture the interest of scientists and the public alike. Above you can listen to the chirp of the merger event, dubbed GW150914, that occurred 1.3 billion years ago, when multicellular life was just emerging on Earth. Indeed, these sounds are so intriguing that they are being turned into musical compositions.
Science that goes ‘chirp’ in the night
By Margaret Harris at the AAAS meeting in Washington DC
Not with a bang, but a chirp.
That’s how the 2016 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) kicked off on Thursday, thanks to the spectacular news that the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) has, for the first time ever, directly observed the ripples in space–time known as gravitational waves. As our news story explains, LIGO’s twin interferometers picked up the waveform produced as two black holes spiralled into each other, emitting gravitational waves at frequencies and amplitudes that rose sharply with time, like the chirp of a cricket.
The LIGO researchers announced their discovery at a packed press conference in downtown Washington, DC. The excitement in the room was palpable, even though, as it turned out, most of the journalists present already knew what they were about to hear. This actually isn’t unusual. It’s common practice for scientific journals to send new research papers to journalists a few days ahead of publication; the idea behind this so-called embargo system is that it gives journalists time to report accurately on complex science stories.
What was unusual was that this time, there was no embargoed paper. Instead, there was a vigorous rumour mill casting out information in a messy, somewhat underhand and highly anisotropic way. This is rather interesting, and I wish that LIGO’s Gabriela González hadn’t dismissed the journalist who asked about it with an incredulous “The facts are so beautiful – why do you talk about rumours?”
Perimeter Institute discuss LIGO findings
By Michael Banks
Following the exciting news that the US-based Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory has discovered gravitational waves, the folks at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada are hosting a live webcast panel discussion at 13:00 EST (18:00 GMT) today.
Has Advanced LIGO found gravitational waves?
By Hamish Johnston
For the past few days, rumours have been swirling that the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (Advanced LIGO) has detected gravitiational waves. Advanced LIGO comprises two huge (kilometre-sized) interferometers in the US, which began taking data in September 2015. The source of the rumours seems to be the physicist and author Lawrence Krauss, who wrote on Twitter yesterday that “My earlier rumour about LIGO has been confirmed by independent sources. Stay tuned! Gravitational waves may have been discovered!! Exciting.”
And it would be very exciting, except for the fact that LIGO spokesperson Gabriela González of Louisiana State University has since told the Guardian newspaper that “The LIGO instruments are still taking data today, and it takes us time to analyse, interpret and review results, so we don’t have any results to share yet.”
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Nergis Mavalvala on the upcoming Advanced LIGO run
By Louise Mayor in Waterloo, Canada
The search for ripples in space–time known as gravitational waves is one of my favourite scientific endeavours. So here at the Perimeter Institute’s Convergence conference, I couldn’t miss the opportunity to talk to Nergis Mavalvala, one of the speakers here.
A physicist at MIT, Mavalvala works on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US. LIGO’s first six observing runs took place from 2002 to 2010 and yielded no detection of a gravitational wave. Since then, LIGO physicists have been working on increasing the instrument’s sensitivity – they needed to make it even better at measuring the stretching and compressing of the interferometers’ 4 km-long arms thought to occur if a gravitational wave passes through them.
Five years on, LIGO’s $200m upgrade is now complete.
Louise Mayor bags European astronomy journalism prize
By Matin Durrani
If you think that writing a great feature article about physics is easy, think again. You want something that’s pitched at the right level for the audience. You’ve got to avoid jargon and explain technical terms where necessary. You can’t go on and on – you’re not trying to rewrite Wikipedia.
Most importantly, you need to tell a good story and say something new, different and intriguing. And remember, your readers could switch off at any point, so the article has to be well written, flow well from point to point, have plenty of colour and, ideally, have some pay-off or punch-line at the end. No point just trailing off into nothingness. Oh, and good pictures, headlines and captions are a must.
So I’m sure you’ll join me in congratulating my colleague Louise Mayor – features editor of Physics World magazine – who has won this year’s European Astronomy Journalism Prize for an article she wrote for the October 2014 edition of the magazine. Her winning article is entitled “Hunting gravitational waves using pulsars” and looks at efforts to detect gravitational waves using radio telescopes to observe distant pulsars.