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LIGO witnesses another black hole crash

Image: Gravitational waves
An artist’s conception shows gravitational waves emanating like ripples in space time as two black holes approach each other in their orbits. (Credit: T. Pyle / LIGO)

t looks as if gravitational-wave watchers are in for a bumpy, beautiful ride. Scientists using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, have confirmed the detection of another merger involving two faraway black holes.

The observations, which were made last Christmas and reported today in a paper published by Physical Review Letters, support the idea that LIGO could open up a whole new branch of astronomy focusing on gravitational disturbances and black holes.

“It is a promising start to mapping the populations of black holes in our universe,” Gabriela Gonzalez, a Louisiana State University astrophysicist who serves as the spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, said in a news release.

She and her colleagues say this smash-up was smaller than the first black-hole merger, which was observed in September and reported by the LIGO team in February. That clash involved black holes that were 29 and 36 times as massive as the sun. This one brought together black holes that were eight and 14 times the sun’s mass.

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Magnetoshell gets in on NASA’s way-out funding

Image: Magnetoshell aerocapture concept
MSNW’s magnetoshell aerocapture concept could help ease spaceships into orbit. (Credit: MSNW)

A system that would use magnetic fields to ease a spacecraft into orbit after an interplanetary journey has won a $500,000 grant from NASA’s advanced research program for MSNW, a company based in Redmond. Wash.

The money for MSNW is one of eight Phase II awards made through the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, also known as NIAC. Other projects look into such way-out ideas as suspended animation, beamed energy for interstellar travel and a satellite-airplane hybrid that could stay up in the air for months at a time.

MSNW’s magnetoshell aerocapture system is designed to take advantage of aerodynamic drag as well as magnetized plasma to slow a spacecraft down and as it dips through a planet’s atmosphere.

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1,015 LIGO scientists share $3 million prize

Image: LIGO Hanford
The beamlines for the LIGO detector site at Hanford stretch out across the desert terrain of southeastern Washington. Each arm of the L-shaped detector is 2.5 miles long. (Credit: LIGO)

This year’s revelations about gravitational waves are certain to win someone a Nobel Prize someday, but an even richer prize has already been awarded to the scientists behind the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO.

Caltech’s Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever, along with MIT’s Rainer Weiss, are among the winners of a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, worth $3 million. Those three founders of the $1.1 billion LIGO project will share $1 million of the prize. The remaining $2 million will be divvied up among the 1,012 authors ofFebruary’s research paper detailing the gravitational wave detection.

The announcement was made on May 2 by the prize selection committee.

Over the past five years, Breakthrough Prizes have been given out to researchers in life sciences, physics and mathematics. The founders of the prize program include such billionaire tech luminaries as Google’s Sergei Brin, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Russian investor Yuri Milner. (Milner is also behind the recently announcedBreakthrough Starshot mission to Alpha Centauri.)

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Collider gets set to take on antimatter mystery

Image: Belle II detector
Scientists and technicians insert one of the optical components into the iTOP particle identification detector at the SuperKEKB accelerator in Japan. The “Imaging Time of Propagation” apparatus, or iTOP, is part of SuperKEKB’s Belle II detector. (Credit: PNNL)

What happened to all the antimatter? A particle-smasher in Japan is well on its way to addressing that question and others on the frontier of physics.

The SuperKEKB accelerator is designed to smash together tightly focused beams of electrons and anti-electrons (better known as positrons) and track the subatomic particles that wink in and out of existence as a result.

The collider will follow up on an earlier round of experiments at the KEK laboratory in Tsukuba. Over the past five years, KEK’s 1.9-mile-round (3-kilometer-round) underground ring has been upgraded to produce collisions at a rate 40 times higher than the earlier KEKB experiments did. Europe’s Large Hadron Collider may smash protons together at higher energies, but SuperKEKB will trump the LHC when it comes to the “Intensity Frontier.”

On Feb. 10, scientists circulated a beam of positrons around the SuperKEKB ring at nearly the speed of light. Then, on Feb. 26, they sent a separate beam of electrons at similar velocities, but going in the opposite direction. These “first turns” serve as major milestones on the way to next year’s first physics run, when both beams will circulate simultaneously and smash into each other in SuperKEKB’s upgraded Belle II detector.

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Stephen Hawking hails gravitational wave find

Image: Stephen Hawking
British physicist Stephen Hawking, who has theorized about black holes for decades, congratulated the scientists behind the first-ever detection of gravitational waves. (Credit: NASA)

British physicist Stephen Hawking says the detection of gravitational waves provides a completely new way of looking at the universe, and is at least as important as thedetection of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider.

The results reported by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory mark the first-ever observations of a black hole merger, and the first of what’s expected to be many observations of gravitational waves. “The ability to detect them has the potential to revolutionize astronomy,” Hawking told the BBC after LIGO’s announcement on Feb. 11.

The waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime, set off in the course of gravitational interactions. Their existence was predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity a century ago, but until now, no instruments were sensitive enough to detect them.

LIGO uses two sets of L-shaped detectors in Hanford, Wash., and Livingston, La. Each detector takes advantage of finely tuned, cross-interfering lasers to register distortions in spacetime that are tinier than one ten-thousandth of the size of a proton.

In addition to confirming a key claim of general relativity, LIGO’s readings provide the best evidence to date that black holes actually exist.

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Scientists detect gravitational waves at last

Image: Black hole merger
A computer simulation shows two black holes shortly before they merge into one. (Credit: SXS)

WASHINGTON, D.C. – After more than a decade of looking, scientists say they’ve detected the gravitational waves given off when two black holes merged into one bigger black hole.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have detected gravitational waves. We did it!” Caltech physicist David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, declared at the National Press Club on Feb. 11.

Reitze compared the LIGO project to a “scientific moonshot,” and then added, “We landed on the moon.”

The news was greeted with applause at the Washington briefing – and at a gathering of scientists and journalists in Hanford, Wash., the home of one of LIGO’s miles-long, L-shaped detectors.

The detection represents what’s likely to be a Nobel Prize-worthy discovery. It provides the best confirmation yet for a claim made a century ago in Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity: that gravitational interactions should give off energy in the form of ripples in the fabric of spacetime.

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LIGO plans big reveal about gravitational waves

Image: Gravitational waves
This visualization shows gravitational waves produced by two orbiting black holes. (Credit: NASA)

It looks as if scientists have chosen Thursday as the day to announce a potentially Nobel Prize-winning discovery: the first detection of gravitational waves, a century after they were predicted by Albert Einstein.

After months of rumors, simultaneous events have been scheduled for 7:30 a.m. PT in Washington, D.C., as well as in Italy, in Britain – and at Hanford, Wash., where one of the detectors for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory was built a decade and a half ago.

Since then, researchers using the Hanford detector and its twin in Livingston, La., have been looking for the ripples in spacetime created by violent clashes in the distant universe – for example, mergers of two black holes, collisions of neutron stars or the flare-up of supernovae.

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After gravity-wave rumors, it’s go time for LIGO

Image: LIGO optics
Optics technician Gary Traylor uses a light to inspect one of the laser-reflecting mirrors at the LIGO facility in Livingston, La. (Credit: Matt Heintze / Caltech / MIT / LIGO Lab)

The scientists behind the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory are getting ready to reveal their latest findings, amid a flurry of speculation over whether or not they’ve made the first-ever detection of waves rippling through spacetime.

Fred Raab, the head of the LIGO laboratory in Hanford, Wash., isn’t telling.

“As we have done for the past 15 years, we take data, analyze the data, write up the results for publication in scientific journals, and once the results are accepted for publication, we announce results broadly on the day of publication or shortly thereafter,” he told GeekWire in an email.

In a follow-up phone call, Raab noted that if the historical trend holds true, the results should be ready to submit for publication as early as this month.

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Science News

Startups bring new attitude to fusion quest

Image: Prototype fusion reactor
General Fusion is working on a prototype fusion reactor. (Credit: General Fusion)

The lab where a company called General Fusion is trying to spark an energy revolution looks like a cross between a hardware store and a mad scientist’s lair. Bins full of electrical gadgets are piled high against the walls. Capacitors recycled from a bygone experiment are stacked up like bottles in wine racks. Ten-foot-high contraptions bristle with tangled wires and shiny plumbing.

Michael Delage, General Fusion’s vice president for strategy and corporate development, makes sure nothing is turned on when he takes a visitor through the lab, which is tucked away in a bland industrial park near Vancouver. He’s worried about the voltage.

“If you get a broken wire or something like that, you get a very loud bang,” Delage explains.

His company and others are looking for a bang of a different sort: a smashing together of superhot hydrogen atoms that produces a net gain in energy. Nuclear fusion. It’s the same mass-to-energy reaction that’s behind the sun’s radiative power and the blast of a hydrogen bomb, but scaled down to a manageable level for power generation.

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LHC readings intrigue physicists: Stay tuned

Image: Diphoton excess
A computer graphic shows the spray of particles created by a proton collision in the Large Hadron Collider’s CMS detector. The two green lines indicate the emission of two photons. Physicists say that could be part of an intriguing pattern, or merely a coincidence. (Thomas McCauley / CERN / CMS)

The Higgs boson is the biggest find of the century in particle physics, but for the past few weeks, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider have been considering whether there’s a mystery that’s even bigger. Or at least more massive.

The potential mystery has to do with a pattern of particle decay that results in the emission of two photons. The readings collected so far by the teams using the ATLAS and CMS detectors point to a slight “bump” in the expected pattern.

That may hint at the existence of a previously undetected particle with a mass of about 750 billion electron volts – six times heavier than the Higgs, French physicist Adam Falkowski (a.k.a. Jester) writes in his Resonaances blog.

Could it be a second Higgs boson? Evidence for gravitons or extra dimensions? Ever since the findings were made public three weeks ago, theories have been flying around like speeding muons, and with good reason. “If the diphoton excess is really a new particle, we are basically guaranteed to find other phenomena beyond the Standard Model,” Falkowski says.

However, the two-photon excess may be merely a coincidence – the sort of pattern that pops up in an early stage of data collection, but fades away when more readings are factored into the findings.

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