Latest news with #gravitationalwaves
New York Times
20 hours ago
- General
- New York Times
Scientific Discoveries, and Dreams, in the Balance
One of the joys of science journalism is in seeing dreams come true — watching scientists push their career chips across the table, on behalf of a vision or a mission that will take years to achieve, and finally win. Their stories are sagas of passion, curiosity and sacrifice. William Borucki, a space scientist who didn't have a Ph.D., and his collaborator, David Koch, spent 20 years trying to convince NASA that a space telescope could find planets by detecting their shadows on other stars. NASA rejected their proposal five times until ultimately relenting. 'It's a wonderful thing to have someone tell you over and over again everything that is wrong with your experiment,' Mr. Borucki once said. He changed the galaxy: The Kepler satellite, launched in 2009, discovered more than 4,000 exoplanets in a small patch of the Milky Way, suggesting that there were as many as 40 billion potentially habitable planets in the Milky Way alone. Scientists involved in the effort to detect the space-time ripples known as gravitational waves tell a similar story. In the 1970s and 80s, when Rainer Weiss, a physicist at M.I.T., and Kip Thorne of Caltech started talking to the National Science Foundation about the possibility of observing these waves, 'everybody thought we were out of our minds,' Dr. Weiss once said. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump science cuts may close WA LIGO observatory that confirmed theory of relativity
The Trump administration wants to close one of the nation's two cutting-edge observatories — one of them in the Tri-Cities — that made scientific history and launched a new way to study the universe. It's part of a $5.2 billion, or 57% cut, proposed Friday for the National Science Foundation and could result in the permanent closure of one of the special observatories, threatening the U.S.'s scientific leadership in such research. The National Science Foundation funds two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories, LIGO Hanford, which is about 10 miles from Richland on unused Hanford nuclear site land, and its twin, LIGO Livingston in Louisiana. In 2015 the two LIGOs detected gravitational waves from outer space passing through the Earth for the first time, nearly 100 years after Albert Einstein predicted their existence. The detection of matching vibrations at both sites confirmed that the infinitesimal movement detected was from gravitational waves reaching Earth from a violent event in space. In the first detection it was from the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago. The finding led to a Nobel Prize in Physics for the work by three U.S. professors emeritus to design and build the two observatories. Since the two U.S. LIGOs came online, gravitational wave observatories have begun operating in Italy and Japan, but the United States remains the leader in the field with the most advanced and sensitive equipment. Fiscal 2026 budget documents released late Friday by the Trump administration proposed reducing the overall budget for the two LIGOs by 40% from $48 million in fiscal 2024 to $29 million in fiscal 2026. The current fiscal budget signed into law in March has not yet had program-specific spending plans released to compare to the fiscal 2026 proposal. The document released Friday is the Trump administration's recommendation for fiscal 2026, which Congress will use as a guide as it sets the budget amount. The Trump proposal calls for not only closing one of the two U.S. observatories in fiscal 2026 but also reducing LIGO spending for technology development. The two LIGOs were planned to be in an upgrade phase in 2026, with technology improvements being made to both. The Trump administration has not said which LIGO it would favor shutting down or why both would not be kept open with limited operations. If one of the two LIGOs were closed for a year, rehiring their highly specialized scientists to resume operating the next year could be very difficult, say officials. Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry has been a frequent visitor to the White House in Trump's second term, as reported by the Shreveport Times, while Washington state is led by a Democrat governor and has filed numerous lawsuits against the Trump administration. On Wednesday, Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown joined a coalition of 15 other attorneys general to file a lawsuit against the Trump administrations attempts to cut National Science Foundation programs that it said helped maintain the United States' position as a global leader in science, technology, engineering and math. The 'National Science Foundation FY 2026 Budget Request to Congress' calls the LIGO system 'the most sensitive detector of gravitational waves ever built' and the leader in 'the worldwide effort to study the structure and evolution of the universe through gravitational radiation.' Since the initial detection of gravitational waves passing through Earth in 2015 through early spring of this year, the two LIGOs have detected 290 possible gravitational wave events from mergers of black holes and neutron stars, with more detections being made as scientific equipment has been upgraded and improved. The most recent improvements were made with the goal of improved detection and more advanced data analysis methods to allow scientists to extract more information from detections and increase their understanding of black holes and neutron stars. With improvements in sensitivity also comes new opportunities to detect signals from sources other than mergers, such as the continuous gravitational-wave signals that are generated by rapidly rotating neutron stars in our Galaxy, according to LIGO officials. At LIGO Hanford vacuum tubes extend for 2.5 miles at right angles across previously unused Hanford site shrub steppe land near the Tri-Cities. At the end of each tube, a mirror is suspended on glass fibers. A high-power laser beam is split to go down each tube, bouncing off the mirrors at each end. If the beam is undisturbed, it will bounce back and recombine perfectly. But if a gravitational wave is pulsing through the Earth, making one of the tubes repeatedly infinitesimally longer and the other infinitesimally shorter, the beam will not recombine as expected. LIGO Hanford and its Louisiana twin now can measure the stretching and the squeezing of the fabric of space-time on scales 10 thousand trillion times smaller than a human hair. Having multiple gravitational-wave observatories can allow scientist to localize the region of the sky from which the signal emerged and alert astronomers using more traditional telescopes, as well as neutrino detectors, to make observations. LIGO's most important finding to date may have been the detection of the fiery collision of two neutron stars in August 2017, opening up a new field of astronomy. The crash of the neutron stars — the collapsed cores of large stars — spewed material that radioactively decayed, creating heavy metals like gold and platinum. Unlike black holes, colliding neutron stars emit a flash of light in the form of gamma rays. It allows the event to be captured both by LIGO and by observatories that observe forms of light, including X-ray, ultraviolet, infrared and radiowaves. It was the first time that a cosmic event had been viewed in both gravitational waves and light, giving scientists a new way of learning about the universe through 'multi-messenger astronomy.' Within months, about a quarter of the world's professional astronomers have been involved in the follow-up of the initial discovery.
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Black hole dance illuminates hidden math of the universe
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Scientists have made the most accurate predictions yet of the elusive space-time disturbances caused when two black holes fly closely past each other. The new findings, published Wednesday (May 14) in the journal Nature, show that abstract mathematical concepts from theoretical physics have practical use in modeling space-time ripples, paving the way for more precise models to interpret observational data. Gravitational waves are distortions in the fabric of space-time caused by the motion of massive objects like black holes or neutron stars. First predicted in Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity in 1915, they were directly detected for the first time a century later, in 2015. Since then, these waves have become a powerful observational tool for astronomers probing some of the universe's most violent and enigmatic events. To make sense of the signals picked up by sensitive detectors like LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) and Virgo, scientists need extremely accurate models of what those waves are expected to look like, similar in spirit to forecasting space weather. Until now, researchers have relied on powerful supercomputers to simulate black hole interactions that require refining black hole trajectories step by step, a process that is effective but slow and computationally expensive. Now, a team led by Mathias Driesse of Humboldt University in Berlin has taken a different approach. Instead of studying mergers, the researchers focused on "scattering events" — instances in which two black holes swirl close to each other under their mutual gravitational pull and then continue on separate paths without merging. These encounters generate strong gravitational wave signals as the black holes accelerate past one another. To model these events precisely, the team turned to quantum field theory, which is a branch of physics typically used to describe interactions between elementary particles. Starting with simple approximations and systematically layering complexity, the researchers calculated key outcomes of black hole flybys: how much they are deflected, how much energy is radiated as gravitational waves and how much the behemoths recoil after the interaction. Their work incorporated five levels of complexity, reaching what physicists call the fifth post-Minkowskian order — the highest level of precision ever achieved in modeling these interactions. Reaching this level "is unprecedented, and represents the most precise solution to Einstein's equations produced to date," Gustav Mogull, a particle physicist at Queen Mary University of London and a co-author of the study, told The team's reaction to achieving the landmark precision was "mostly just astonishment that we managed to get the job done," Mogull recalled. Related stories: — What is the theory of general relativity? Understanding Einstein's space-time revolution — What are gravitational waves? — What is string theory? While calculating the energy radiated as gravitational waves, researchers found that intricate six-dimensional shapes known as Calabi–Yau manifolds appeared in the equations. These abstract geometrical structures — often visualized as higher-dimensional analogues of donut-like surfaces — have long been a staple of string theory, a framework attempting to unify quantum mechanics with gravity. Until now, they were believed to be purely mathematical constructs, with no directly testable role tied to observable phenomena. In the new study, however, these shapes appeared in calculations describing the energy radiated as gravitational waves when two black holes cruised past one another. This marks the first time they've appeared in a context that could, in principle, be tested through real-world experiments. Mogull likens their emergence to switching from a magnifying glass to a microscope, revealing features and patterns previously undetectable. "The appearance of such structures sheds new light on the sorts of mathematical objects that nature is built from," he said. These findings are expected to significantly enhance future theoretical models that aim to predict gravitational wave signatures. Such improvements will be crucial as next-generation gravitational wave detectors — including the planned Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) and the Einstein Telescope in Europe — come online in the years ahead. "The improvement in precision is necessary in order to keep up with the higher precision anticipated from these detectors," Mogull said.
