What Is Hidden In The Universe‘s Gravity?
The Universe is filled with the whispers of millions of gravitational signals that are so weak we cannot differentiate them as individual events. But we could maybe get some data from the whispers as a whole.
Image by Alexander Antropov from Pixabay
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Last year, when the COVID-19 pandemic was but a glimmer in the eye of the future, the gravitational wave detector grid Advanced LIGO-VIRGO observed a total of 35 events of black holes merging with neutron stars. And that is very cool. But as Rory Smith from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Gravitational Wave Discovery in Australia says: How many other events did we miss?
Smith thinks there were a lot of them. About two million. He estimates that roughly every 200 seconds a pair of stellar-size black holes collide. And when it comes to neutron stars – those should collide every 15 seconds. These should create an ever-present gravitational whisper that fills the Universe. Smith and his colleagues developed a way that should allow us to get interesting data from these whispers.
Thanks to this new method that is currently being tested by LIGO’s team we should be able to see gravitational signals from much further away. It can peek 8 billion light-years further into the Universe than current methods. This opens up the door to observe gravitational events from the young Universe where a lot of interesting things took place.
Whenever two black holes collide and merge an enormous amount of energy is released in form of gravitational waves. These waves then carry information about spacetime and matter in the most extreme of conditions. Whenever we detect individual gravitational waves we can get amazing data from them.
Sadly, everything suggests that the vast majority of such events create too weak gravitational waves for us to current detect as individual signals. Thus, we are missing a lot of amazing data. Another problem is that currently, we are only detecting the closest and loudest gravitational events. This inevitably distorts our view on the wild world of collisions of gravitational monsters.
If we manage to get data from the sea of gravitational wave whispers we could learn incredible things about the environments in which stars are born, live, and die. Especially information from the very young Universe should be extremely interesting. If the new method of analyzing the gravitational whispers succeeds on the Advanced LIGO-VIRGO soon we could launch a completely new program of observing the gravity of the Universe.
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