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Science Quickly

How to Find Loooong Gravitational Waves

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.2639 Ratings

🗓️ 6 March 2017

⏱️ 3 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The gravitational waves found last year were short compared with the monster waves that could be turned up by what's called Pulsar Timing Arrays.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

0:05.8

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0:11.0

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0:19.6

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0:22.7

.j.p. That's Y-A-K-U-L-T.C-O.J-P. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacult.

0:33.5

This is Scientific Americans' 60-second science. I'm Steve Merski. Got a minute?

0:39.5

In 2016, the laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory, LIGO, made the first accepted detection of gravitational waves.

0:49.6

So anytime you move a mass, it produces a gravitational wave. So black holes, like the ones Lago

0:54.5

detected, these are stellar mass black holes, about 10 times the mass of the sun. When they're

0:59.2

in orbit, they're accelerating constantly, so constantly producing gravitational waves.

1:03.3

Sarah Berks-Belor of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico at the annual

1:09.1

meeting of the American Association for the Advancement

1:11.6

of Science in Boston on February 18th. For gravitational waves produced by the acceleration of even

1:17.7

bigger masses, we're going to need what's called the laser interferometer space antenna, or Lisa.

1:23.5

Now, if you think of much bigger masses, something like, you know, a million times the mass of the sun,

1:28.8

these things are moving much more slowly, much more far apart, and they're producing lower frequency gravitational waves.

1:35.0

And this is what Lisa can detect.

1:36.9

So Lago, which is operating at these very fast orbits, fast frequencies, is unable to detect these things that are moving much more slowly

1:45.2

and are on a much bigger scale.

1:46.9

And for even bigger masses, you get to what Berks Spalore is working on, pulsar timing arrays.

1:53.2

What we do with this technique is use radio telescopes to observe pulsars, which are neutron stars

1:58.7

that are rotating very rapidly and sending their beams of

...

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