Gravity Waves Detected

[T3sl4co1l]

This is really cool, as far as I can understand the problem preventing detection earlier was noise from local sources, i.e. trucks driving by outside. It would be interesting to know how they managed to suppress the noise enough.

I made an interesting comment about that, on a recent hangout stream:
I think, towards the end.  I'd love to see the designs they've used.  Suffice it to say, this would be impossible by something like 20 orders of magnitude if they didn't have many-axis dampeners/isolators to account for everything from seismic movement to... people walking around.

Tim

[hopski]

Does anyone know if they could determine the direction to the origin of the signal with this machine? I assume that could be done by linking several interferometers and keeping track of the delay between signals.

They only had two locations working, so they were able to detect hemisphere, but not accurate direction.

That's right only the two detectors at Hanford, Washinton and Liivingston Louisiana were working at the time and they were the only ones with the sensitivity to detect the event anyway, so getting a precise direction was not possible.

[apis]

I assume that will be possible eventually, when more detectors get online?

This is really cool, as far as I can understand the problem preventing detection earlier was noise from local sources, i.e. trucks driving by outside. It would be interesting to know how they managed to suppress the noise enough.

I made an interesting comment about that, on a recent hangout stream:
(...) I think, towards the end.  I'd love to see the designs they've used.  Suffice it to say, this would be impossible by something like 20 orders of magnitude if they didn't have many-axis dampeners/isolators to account for everything from seismic movement to... people walking around.

Tim

Thanks, there is a comment about it at around 38 minutes (but not as much details as one might hope for unfortunately). Interesting video though.

[3roomlab]

I caught this video while scouring around about LIGO/VIRGO. it appears NASA already has a gravity sensor satellite since 2002
and the satellite measures gravity variations via a 200km+ laser distance measurement. fascinating !

[Kleinstein]

Those gravity mapping satellites are way less sensitive than detecting gravity waves. The Grace satellites look for the deviation of the earth from a perfect sphere - thus detecting mountains under water and changes in the crust density.  The not so even earth makes is necessary to move the satellites for gravitational wave detection further away from the earth - so they may not actually be satellites in the strict sense.