Because every now and then we can take note of undiluted coolth that has exactly no political content.
The news came a few days ago, but on cosmic time scales that’s still hot of the presses: LIGO, the twin instrument gravitational wave detectors, in collaboration with the European VIRGO detector, announced the discovery of four new black-hole collisions, measured in the gravity waves given off by those titanic wrecks.
That’s hot stuff: the report of the first gravity-wave detection came just two years ago, paying off a prediction first made (tentatively) by Albert Einstein almost exactly a century earlier in his general theory of relativity.
In its most compact form the general theory boils down to a single equation, just one short line of symbols. The quip is that in relativity, it all boils down to space and time telling matter and energy where to go, while energy and matter tell spacetime what shape to be. A gravity wave is that joke in action: matter-energy in violent motion jostles spacetime into waves we can, only in the last few years, actually see.
Since the first time human beings detected a gravity wave in the wild, 2015 ten more events have been recorded — nine more black hole collisions and one neutron star smash-up. In that short time, gravity wave research has gone from theoretical possibility to a breakthrough discovery to a branch of observational astronomy.
That is: gravity waves are no longer strange, singular events (or not that strange, and not truly rare). Instead, they’re becoming objects of investigation in which statistics are starting to accumulate: there’s now a catalogue of gravity wave events, which is astronomy’s way of letting itself know there’s a newly observable sky up there. New properties are being explored — one of the events recorded in this latest run opens the exploration of gravity wave polarization. Perhaps most important, the neutron star collision produced an electromagnetic signal as well as a gravitational one — meaning that folks using conventional light gathering telescopes could also observe the event.
That’s genuinely transformative, the capstone to the 2oth century sequence of discovery that transformed how we see the night sky — an extension of human perception greater, perhaps, even than that Galileo launched with his telescope.
From the middle of the century forward, our ability to look into the night sky expanded throughout the electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma rays to radio waves. The universe became richer, more detailed, more beautiful and more strange…as you can see below in the multi-spectrum image of the Milky Way:
It’s important to realize that these aren’t just pretty pictures. The details of the radiation that an object gives off is a window on the physics that produces one signal or another; the distribution of the energy released in across the electromagnetic spectrum is a probe of the life, times, and history of a star, a galaxy, or the cosmos as a whole. What makes the birth of multi-messenger astronomy so sweet is that it adds a whole new mode of inquiry — as more detections accumulate of events that produce both light and gravitational waves, researchers will be able to build an ever richer picture of how our universe actually works.
Doing so won’t affect the price of eggs. It won’t solve climate change. It won’t make it easier to navigate the Maze on the Oakland approaches to the Bay Bridge. It is just beautiful, and that only for those who’ve got the taste for abstract forms of beauty. As the remnants of stars collide, reality judders — and we can now watch it happen (or happened…as each of these events happen billions of light years distant, which means they occurred billions of years in the past).
It boils down to this, for me, and maybe for you: we have all the evidence we need, overflowing daily, of the crap human beings do, and the misery — often in our names — that people do to each other and the world. I find it joyful, and at least a bit of an antidote, to remember that our species, our tax dollars, and some of our contemporaries, can perform something so difficult, disinterested, and purely, deeply, ridiculously cool.
Open thread.
Images: Pietro Rotary, Girl looking through a telescope, before 1762.
CMG Lee, Comparison of photographs of the Milky Way at different wavelengths, 2007.
*With apologies to DougJ for borrowing his schtick…and a bonus performance of what lies behind the title:
jacy
I live about 20 minutes from LIGO, take the kids every so often. It’s weird and arwsome to see the inner workings.
A Ghost To Most
“What it Means”
OldDave
I know that half past dead feeling.
Villago Delenda Est
Yes, but “The Weight” is one of the Band’s (many) bests.
Redshift
I know! It’s just so cool!
jl
Why are all these black holes running into each other?
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Cheryl Rofer:
But didn’t they just get back from the Delta Quadrant?
The news says Voyager 2 left the Sol System. I thought Voyager 1 left earlier?
Cheryl Rofer
Voyager 2 just passed the heliopause.
Ohio Mom
I sometimes wonder how scientists feel about the idea that stuff it takes them decades and centuries to figure out soon becomes everyday information.
For instance, genetics. It was a huge deal when DNA was described and photographed — and how much theorizing and experimenting went before, and what about the very specialized technology that had to be developed first?
It all took very high-level thinking, and now mere junior high students can tell you all about how DNA is a double-helix and the difference between mitosis and meiosis.
And for the subject of this post, it took literally an Einstein to imagine gravity waves could exist and now even me, the former art major, can (sort of) follow the information laid out in this post.
Raven
And listen to Pop Staples!
A Ghost To Most
@Villago Delenda Est: “Richard Manuel is dead.”
Raven
@Ohio Mom: I think it’s called building knowledge.
russell
when i die and (if i) go to heaven, in my wildest dreams it will be mavis who sings me home. with roebuck accompanying on his tremolo guitar. that is all.
Jerzy Russian
@jl:
Their orbits lose energy via the emission of gravitational waves. Thus, the two objects get closer together. Eventually they merge. The initial orbital period of the two objects needs to be less than a certain threshold in order to have them merge within the age of the Universe (about 13.7 billion years).
Lee Hartmann
“an extension of human perception greater, perhaps, even than that Galileo launched with his telescope.”
sorry, Tom, no. Galileo proved that Venus went around the Sun, not the Earth, that Jupiter had moons orbiting it like the planets around the solar system, that the Moon had mountains and valleys and was a world in some sense like the Earth. Detecting gravity waves, whose radiation was proven more than 20 years ago from the orbital decay of the binary pulsar, was just a question of when, not if. More importantly, in transforming our understanding of our place in the universe, gravity wave detection, however exciting, is a blip compared to Galileo’s importance. “Perception” is doing too much heavy lifting. Get a grip.
Adam L Silverman
@jl: Hard to see in the dark.
Cheryl Rofer
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Yes. The article I linked has more.
?BillinGlendaleCA
Love the Milky Way in various spectrums, I downloaded the PDF from NASA. Via the same Google search I found a web post about white balance in astrophotography(most folk get it wrong and end up with too warm an image). Who says this isn’t a Full Service Blog!
schrodingers_cat
@Lee Hartmann: It was Copernicus who came up with the heliocentric model not Galileo. There was Kepler who came up with laws of planetary motion. Galileo made observations using the telescope and we had to wait for Newton to tie it all together.
Kristine
I visited LIGO-Hanford in 2002. Memories.
A Ghost To Most
@russell: Excellent choice. The last songs I want to hear are Jackson Browne’s “Walkin’ Slow”, Led Zeppelin’s “Ramble On”, Steve Earle’s “Over Yonder”, and DBT’s “The Living Bubba”.
jl
@Jerzy Russian: @Adam L Silverman: Thanks for the explainers. I’m going with Silverman’s theory.
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer: @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: And we all know how that ends!
chopper
dang, whatever crazy ad garbage is going on behind the scenes on the mobile site has gotten worse. phone went from 19 to 8 percent just loading this page.
chopper
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
long way from the oort cloud tho.
Adam L Silverman
@jl: Always a perspicacious choice!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: jl lives on the edge.
Central Planning
@Tom up top:
I heard a discussion on Startalk about whether or not we have free will, and, it seems like that statement is what drives our illusion that we do have free will. That boggles my mind.
Inventor
I freakin’ love that song!
RIP Levon.
Just One More Canuck
Hey Carmen, c’mon let’s go downtown
Keith P.
The space-bound version (LISA) is going to be incredible…no more hyper-complex vibration reduction (the science between just that part of the earth-bound version blows my mind) with each leg several orders of magnitude larger than LIGO.
d2theG
From a long time lurker – this touched me. Ouch!
debbie
My #1 favorite song and band back in high school days.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Adam L Silverman:
Well, it did revive Shatner’s acting career. Then we got TJ Hooker and that Max Headroom interview.
It’s also funny how the aliens never thought to wipe off Voayger’s nameplate.
dmsilev
@Ohio Mom: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants” – Isaac Newton.
Each generation builds on the work of the previous. Newtonian gravity was once incredibly abstruse, and calculating things with it was Hard. Now, it’s standard grade school knowledge. As a scientist, you’re lucky and grateful if people use your work as a foundation to build other things.
Also, I’d take mild exception to Tom’s statement that the work of LIGO has little direct impact on our daily lives. It is true that gravitational waves per se have little practical use right now, but the technologies that we needed to develop in order to see them feed into things like better clocks (which, among other things, are at the heart of the seemingly-magic GPS system), precision vibration damping (very very interesting if you’re, for instance, building a microchip fab where the transistors are only a few dozen atoms across), etc. Same is true for the big subatomic colliders; they’ve developed techniques for handling and processing truly enormous quantities of data, the WWW was invented at CERN as part of their efforts to improve the flow of information, etc..
Jerzy Russian
@schrodingers_cat:
Galileo came up the the first firm observational proof that the planets (including Earth) orbit the Sun. Until the time of Galileo, the observational data were not good enough to distinguish between the geocentric and the heliocentric views.
Jerzy Russian
@dmsilev: Also too, they have some pretty bitchin’ lasers, to add that technology to the list.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@dmsilev:
You say that like it’s a good thing.
Tom Levenson
@Lee Hartmann: You misunderstand my point, which I perhaps expressed unclearly: it’s not LIGO and the first gravity wave detection that forms the transformation of perception; it’s the whole shebang, from the first use of the spectrum beyond the optical and near infrared region: radio astronomy, and then the successive short and long wavelength explorations of the night sky, now, at this long remove, extending beyond the e-m to gravitational signals.
So, yeah: the impact of the telescope was revolutionary, much more than simply seeing further or more. As you say, the immediate impact of Galileo’s observations was to force the recognition that the universe was very different than previously assumed. That same realization has followed from multi-spectrum and multi-modal observation (including the particle-physics/cosmology link, and not just gravitation).
We can argue whether the work of the last 70 years or so is comparable in scale to that of 1610-1687 (for a plausible, if still somewhat arbitrary time line) — but the changes in perception and the expansion of human observational reach are of the same kind – or so it seems, pretty damn obviously, to me.
YMMV.
Tom Levenson
@dmsilev: Agreed re the benefits that flow from curiosity driven research, and not just in physics. But those are byproducts; the impulse and the direct outcomes of fundamental inquiry emerge not from the expectation of gain, but something else, which we as a species seem to find essential enough to keep doing…which is one of the few aspects of human social life right now that gives me both pleasure and hope.
dmsilev
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Without CERN, there’d be no cat videos.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@dmsilev: I’m on team dog, I can live without cat videos.
schrodingers_cat
@Jerzy Russian: Yes indeed!
dmsilev
@Tom Levenson: I’d say that there’s a spectrum. There are people who live for pushing back the frontiers of understanding simply for its own sake, and there are people who are driven to (for instance, from my neck of the woods) build practical quantum computers. Both “because it’s there” and because it would potentially be extremely useful for a whole host of practical things.
divF
I’m tangentially connected to this business. Some numerical methods that I helped to develop 30+ years ago are now used to perform detailed computer simulations of Einstein’s equations to compute gravitational radiation from colliding black holes.
And I couldn’t pass up listening to this version of The Weight. It made me a little sad, though, remembering that three of the members of The Band died unnecessarily young.
ETA: I know that Levon Helm was 71, but it was throat cancer.
hilts
Tom, I implore you to please continue borrowing DougJ’s schtick.
Just Chuck
I learned about LIGO (and lots of other stuff) from A Capella Science.
Keith P.
@dmsilev: It’s kind of disappointing that we only really have mastery of one of the four fundamental forces. Hell, I’m not even sure if we know gravity is even a true force or just an emergent effect. And gravity is the weakest of the forces, but we can’t do squat with it. I think we can manipulate the weak force a bit, and we can start to overcome the strong force, but we’ve been getting by on just being able to control EM for 100+ years.
Ruckus
@divF:
He came back after the throat cancer and played again. Here he is in 2008.
Ruckus
@Tom Levenson:
I used to say that in my grandads time he was born not long after the birth of the automobile. He was a Packard factory trained mechanic and yet 100 yrs ago this year he traveled by horse drawn wagon with his wife and my dad across this country to settle in CA. He saw 2 world wars, the invention of radio and TV and the landing of men on the moon. And yet born 59 yrs after him, I saw several of the same things. But all of those things are being eclipsed these days with medicines that have cured many deadly diseases, the ability to easily travel thousands of miles in a day rather than in weeks, the ability to see the universe in a much more detailed way, the machine that killed my cancer rather than it killing me. Humans have many flaws, some far more than their share but we also have a lot of strengths as well. The ability to do abstract work which may never pay off in our lifetimes is a pretty good one. Now if we could only learn to live together……….
Cermet
The difficulty of seeing those waves (Einstein thought it would always be impossible, and for good reason!) is staggering. The displacement of a strong single gravity wave (its wavelength) is one ten thousandth of the diameter of a single proton! Talk about unimaginably small! That humans can not just even detect such a ultra tiny displacement but even extract detailed information of the event that caused it is just so amazing it makes one wonder how thug voters can be so stupid when some people are so brilliant (like most dem voters)?