{"id":34793,"date":"2018-10-31T13:21:12","date_gmt":"2018-10-31T07:51:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.forumias.com\/?p=34793"},"modified":"2018-10-31T13:21:12","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T07:51:12","slug":"nobel-prize-in-physics-2017-detectors-of-ripples-in-space-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/nobel-prize-in-physics-2017-detectors-of-ripples-in-space-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Nobel prize in Physics, 2017: Detectors of ripples in space-time:"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/indianexpress.com\/article\/explained\/nobel-prize-in-physics-2017-detectors-of-ripples-in-space-time-4873150\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Nobel prize in Physics, 2017: Detectors of ripples in space-time:<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<p><b>Context<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Nobel Physics Prize 2017 has been awarded to 3 scientists for discoveries in gravitational waves. \u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Last year, Nobel Foundation honoured theoretical work in the topology of matter, ignoring the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo), which had detected gravitational waves 12 months before the ceremony<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This year, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has made amends by honouring the Ligo leadership \u2014 Rainer Weiss, who designed the most sensitive instrument ever made by the human race, Kip S Thorne, who narrowed down the signals and frequencies it was designed to seek, and Barry C Barish, who built the project hands-on.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>What is Ligo&#8217;s exemplary contribution?<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It detected the signature of the first gravity wave on September 15, 2015, which was translated into a sound that was between a chirp and a ping.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>What exactly did Ligo see or hear?<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It heard the collision of two massive black holes that had spun around each other at maniacal velocities and then collided 1.3 billion years ago, when life on earth had barely begun<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The cosmic incident was not visible, since light cannot escape the event horizon of a black hole, but it can be inferred by radiation in the vicinity of the maelstrom of matter and energy<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It also spread gravitational waves, ripples propagating at the speed of light across the fabric of space-time<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Background<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When the first Homo sapiens walked the plains of Africa millennia ago, the waves were sweeping through the Magellanic Cloud, and they reached Earth in September 2015, producing tiny disturbances at Ligo\u2019s laser interferometers in Louisiana and Washington state, apart from the Virgo instrument in Italy. <\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It produced a tiny chirp that shook the world of quantum physics.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>What remained unattended?<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Higgs boson was the last element of the standard model of physics which remained unobserved in the wild.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">With the discovery of the Higgs boson, the laboratory caught up and theory was vindicated. <\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">However, the century-old prediction of gravitational waves remained untested \u2014 actually, it dates back to Henri Poincare\u2019s postulate of 1905.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>What is Ligo&#8217;s contribution with regard to the untested gravitational waves?<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Now, Ligo has provided yet another assurance of the patency of the standard model. <\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Why gravitational wave astronomy is so significant?<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Gravitational wave astronomy will give humanity access to parts of space and time which have remained invisible. <\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Unlike electromagnetic radiation like light, which traverses space-time, they are ripples within the very fabric of space-time. <\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">They are not scattered by matter, and will allow instruments to peer impossibly far into the gulfs of space \u2014 and correspondingly far back in time.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Parts of the universe which have remained dark to optical and radio telescopes will now become visible. <\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Black holes and neutron stars \u2014 bodies so dense that a spoonful of their substance would weigh as much as the earth \u2014 will yield up secrets never seen before.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>How are gravitational waves formed?<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Anything with mass produces gravitational waves when it accelerates.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We produce scads of gravitational waves every time you dance, but they are not strong enough to be picked up by instruments. <\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But anything with a gigantic mass, like a black hole or a neutron star, would generate measurable waves, rendering hitherto hidden phenomena visible.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nobel prize in Physics, 2017: Detectors of ripples in space-time: Context Nobel Physics Prize 2017 has been awarded to 3 scientists for discoveries in gravitational waves. \u00a0 Last year, Nobel Foundation honoured theoretical work in the topology of matter, ignoring the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo), which had detected gravitational waves 12 months before the&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/nobel-prize-in-physics-2017-detectors-of-ripples-in-space-time\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Nobel prize in Physics, 2017: Detectors of ripples in space-time:<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[555],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-test-1","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","views":{"total":0,"cached_at":"","cached_date":1704801398},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34793\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}