Black Holes No Joke

Thursday, June 17 2010 @ 05:03 pm EDT

Contributed by: dgrosvold

by Dr. Tony Phillips

Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory in Livingston, Louisiana. Each of the two arms is 4 kilometers long. LIGO has another such observatory in Hanford, Washington.
Click image for larger view.
Kip Thorne: Why was the black hole hungry?

Stephen Hawking: It had a light breakfast!

Black hole humor—you gotta love it. Unless you’re an astronomer, that is. Black holes are among the most mysterious and influential objects in the cosmos, yet astronomers cannot see into them, frustrating their attempts to make progress in fields ranging from extreme gravity to cosmic evolution.

How do you observe an object that eats light for breakfast?

“Black holes are creatures of gravity,” says physicist Marco Cavaglia of the University of Mississippi. “So we have to use gravitational waves to explore them.”

Enter LIGO—the NSF-funded Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory. According to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, black holes and other massive objects can emit gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of space-time that travel through the cosmos. LIGO was founded in the 1990s with stations in Washington state and Louisiana to detect these waves as they pass by Earth.

“The principle is simple,” says Cavaglia, a member of the LIGO team. “Each LIGO detector is an L-shaped ultra-high vacuum system with arms four kilometers long. We use lasers to precisely measure changes in the length of the arms, which stretch or contract when a gravitational wave passes by.”

Just one problem: Gravitational waves are so weak, they change the length of each detector by just 0.001 times the width of a proton! “It is a difficult measurement,” allows Cavaglia.

Seismic activity, thunderstorms, ocean waves, even a truck driving by the observatory can overwhelm the effect of a genuine gravitational wave. Figuring out how to isolate LIGO from so much terrestrial noise has been a major undertaking, but after years of work the LIGO team has done it. Since 2006, LIGO has been ready to detect gravitational waves coming from spinning black holes, supernovas, and colliding neutron stars anywhere within about 30 million light years of Earth.

So far the results are … nil. Researchers working at dozens of collaborating institutions have yet to report a definite detection.

Does this mean Einstein was wrong? Cavaglia doesn’t think so. “Einstein was probably right, as usual,” he says. “We just need more sensitivity. Right now LIGO can only detect events in our little corner of the Universe. To succeed, LIGO needs to expand its range.”

So, later this year LIGO will be shut down so researchers can begin work on Advanced LIGO—a next generation detector 10 times more sensitive than its predecessor. “We’ll be monitoring a volume of space a thousand times greater than before,” says Cavaglia. “This will transform LIGO into a real observational tool.”

When Advanced LIGO is completed in 2014 or so, the inner workings of black holes could finally be revealed. The punchline may yet make astronomers smile.

Find out more about LIGO at http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/. The Space Place has a LIGO explanation for kids (of all ages) at http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/ligo, where you can “hear” a star and a black hole colliding!

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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