mobile gravitational wave research team
Mar. 14th, 2006 09:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nibot
Tobin and Stefanos working at a cafe. U District, Seattle. March 13, 2006.
Shockingly, I did manage to get a lot of work done yesterday, all at Trabant. Finished my grading for physics 402, put the finishing touches on some problem set solutions for that class, and implemented what we call the "diurnal" analysis of the high-frequency LIGO data.
LIGO is pretty much a big (8 kilometer!) antenna that's listening for gravitational waves rather than electromagnetic waves (the usual light, radio, microwave, etc). Like most antennas, it's more sensitive to waves coming from certain directions than for others—the plot of sensitivity versus direction is called its antenna pattern. This means that the same source of gravitational waves will appear "brighter" or "louder" at certain points in the sky than in others. The trick is that the earth is rotating, while any gravitational wave sources will be really far away and thus at "fixed" locations on the sky, like the stars. If there's a bright source of gravitational waves out there, we should see the signal here increase and decrease as the antenna pattern sweeps out the sky.
Another twist is that we would hope to see this modulation with a frequency that's a multiple of a sidereal day rather than a solar one; the latter would indicate something wrong locally at the instrument, as the sun shouldn't be a source of gravitational waves.
However, I did not find anything.
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no subject
Date: 2006-03-14 02:33 pm (UTC)(Yeah, I'm embarassed I even wrote that, but it's the first thing that popped into my head when I saw the pic and the word "LIGO" in your post.) :-)
no subject
Date: 2006-03-14 06:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-14 09:44 pm (UTC)Dude, you're up here?
Date: 2006-03-15 04:45 am (UTC)-Danyel
"to the gmail to the com."
Stefanos?!
Date: 2006-03-16 04:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-17 07:21 pm (UTC)