Co faktycznie widział LIGO? (Odkrycie fal grawitacyjnych)

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Próbuję znaleźć oryginalne wideo / obraz tego, co LIGO faktycznie widział, ale wszystko, co mogę znaleźć, to artystyczne interpretacje fal grawitacyjnych.

Scott Taylor
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Jak omówiono w mojej odpowiedzi poniżej, LIGO bardziej przypomina mikrofon niż kamerę; więc sensowniej jest mówić o tym, co usłyszeliśmy, niż o tym, co widzieliśmy. Możesz posłuchać sygnału tutaj: youtube.com/watch?v=TWqhUANNFXw
Chris Mueller
Czy lepsza metafora nie byłaby sejsmometrem ?
user151841,
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@user151841 Not really. Seismometers have three output data streams: acceleration in x, y , and z. Also, I think microphones are more intuitively familiar to the non-science public than seismometers. The LIGO detectors are also especially well suited to being compared to a microphone because the sensitive band of the detectors is completely within the range of human hearing.
Chris Mueller
Jeśli chcemy uzyskać pedantyczny, technicznie pomiar LIGO to rzeczywiste wideo z rzeczywistą kamerą. Wszystko, co robią, to ciągłe nagrywanie obrazu rekombinowanego lasera. Aby uzyskać wykresy w odpowiedziach poniżej, konieczne jest dużo przetwarzania matematycznego. Tak naprawdę to wideo jest tym, co „zobaczyli”.
zefir
na pewno ktoś „zremiksował” dźwięk z dźwiękiem słyszalnym przez człowieka? gdzie oni są byłoby fantastycznie słuchać, mieć poczucie ataku / rozpadu / długości itd. na pewno to istnieje? wszystko, co musicie zrobić, to modulować to tak wiele oktaw, prawda?
Fattie

Odpowiedzi:

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Rzeczywisty obraz to niewiele. Udało mi się to znaleźć w nauce , i to wszystko:

enter image description here

To tylko szum, widziany w nieco innym czasie z dwóch różnych obserwatoriów. Przesunięcie idealnie pasuje, przesuwając je o różnicę prędkości światła w ich lokalizacjach. Jest to zatem dowód fal grawitacyjnych.

Należy zauważyć, że powodem istnienia dwóch instrumentów jest sprawdzenie krzyżowe innych źródeł wibracji. Każde obserwatorium działa poprzez wykrywanie drgań w skali 4 km, aż do bardzo małego rzędu wielkości (1/10 000 szerokości protonu). Porównując oba, można założyć, że sygnał musiał pochodzić z nielokalnego źródła, które tylko fale grawitacyjne pasują do tej definicji.

PearsonArtPhoto
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Oryginalne źródło to journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/…
Stop Harming Monica
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"The actual image isn't much", "this is all it is." Your tone understates how awesome it actually is IMO ;). Of course, I'm a little bit biased.
Chris Mueller
How do the two observation locations coordinate their times relative to a shared or common clock? Are they referring to the same atomic clock and making adjustments for "latency", the time it takes to get the time?
TRomano
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@TRomano We use GPS which is accurate to 10s of nanoseconds. You can read more about the aLIGO timing system here: authors.library.caltech.edu/20471/1/…
Chris Mueller
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@ChrisMueller: I suspected it was GPS, but didn't have time to look it up at that moment. Thanks!
PearsonArtPhoto
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First of all, I think your question belies a misunderstanding of the nature of the LIGO observatories. The nature of the detectors is that they act like a microphone, as opposed to a camera. What that means is that they are sensitive to gravitational waves coming in from most directions, but don't have an ability to distinguish where the waves came from. By using multiple detectors (which is also necessary for a confident detection) the difference in time between the detectors can be used to give some idea of the location of the source. It also means that the output of the detectors is a single stream of data.

This image from the paper in Physical Review Letters (not behind a paywall) is a better summary of what LIGO heard than the current accepted answer. I'll explain the panes from top to bottom.

  1. The top panes show the 'raw' signals measured in the two detectors with the H1 data overlayed on the L1 data on the right.
  2. The second row of panes shows a number of different simulations of what general relativity (Einstein's theory) predicts for the gravitational waves. These simulations are how LIGO is able to claim that they know that the wave was caused by two merging black holes.
  3. The third row of panes is the 'raw' data minus the simulations.
  4. The bottom panes are simply another way of plotting the 'raw' data called a time-frequency plot. Time is on the x axis and frequency is on the y axis. To a person from the field this signal is the most recognizable characteristic of a merger, known as a chirp. As time moves forward, the frequency shifts higher. You can actually listen to the 'raw' chirp here.

enter image description here

Chris Mueller
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It's not behind a paywall because the paper is open content—it is licensed under CC BY 3.0.
bwDraco
@bwDraco Good point.
Chris Mueller
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Can you explain why the H1 observation in the upper right plot is marked as "inverted"? I haven't seen anywhere else before remark that H1 is inverted, but I can clearly see that is the case. What's the reason for this?
zephyr
@zephyr: The two detectors are oriented differently (Hanford NW/SW, Livingston WSW/SSE), that might be the reason; I’m just guessing, though.
chirlu
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LIGO didn't "see" anything. It monitors the relative lengths of the paths taken by two laser beams in vacuum pipes about 4km long (although the laser path consists of about 75 trips up and down the arms) and at right angles to each other.

A gravitational wave, travelling at the speed of light, changes the ratio of these lengths (one gets shorter, one gets larger, then they swap) by about plus or minus 1 part in 1021 (a billion trillion) about 30-200 times per second as it passes through the instrument.

The whole event lasted about 0.3 seconds and the trace (which has been all over the news) simply records the fraction by which the length of the arms changes as a function of time.

The event was (nearly) simultaneously recorded by two almost identical setups in different parts of the USA. The detection of the same signal in both detectors rules out a local cause of the disturbance, and the small time delay between the detections allows a rough location of the gravitational wave source on the sky.

Rob Jeffries
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To me, not only is it an amazing accomplishment that we could detect such a small signal, but we could actually predict ahead of time what the signal would look like. I'm flabbergasted that by using models scientist can be fairly certain that the wave was produced by two 30 solar mass black holes colliding (the first publicly released discovery). Einstein rules!!
Jack R. Woods
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According to the GW150914 tutorial, this is what Advanced LIGO L1 and H1 detectors originally saw:

enter image description here

You can download the raw data from this tutorial.

The other answers show already processed (whitened, filtered, shifted by 7 ms, inverted) waveforms.

niutech
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You are correct that this is what the raw data streams out of the detectors look like (note that I was careful in my answer to keep 'raw' in quotes). The sensitive band of the detectors ranges from 10 Hz to 100 kHz, but the raw data stream is dominated by the incredibly large (for LIGO) noise below 10 Hz. You can see this by comparing the units on your plot to those in the plots I posted. Part of the technologies LIGO employs to reach its unprecedented goal involve advanced signal processing.
Chris Mueller
You can see the actual noise curves of the detectors around the time of the detection here: dcc.ligo.org/public/0119/G1500623/001/…
Chris Mueller
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The actual mechanism of measurement that LIGO used is laser interferometry, so one reasonable interpretation of what LIGO "saw" would be the interference pattern caused by the gravity waves, which would "look" something like this:

enter image description here

Unfortunately I could not find an image of the actual laser interference that LIGO mentioned; it's probably too small for photography anyway.

All the other graphs people are linking do are just graphs of the interference pattern data. Showing a graph of the LIGO data as an answer to this question is like showing an image histogram as an answer to the question, "What does the Hubble space telescope see?"

user151841
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This is actually the interference pattern of two overlapping laser beams with different curvatures, and is what one might expect to see in a cheap interferometer (see e.g. Newton's rings). However, LIGO has incredibly well made mirrors so the interference at the output of the detector does not have any rings, and, in fact, is completely black on the scale of this image.
Chris Mueller
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I don't know whether it's interesting for you, but here is the link of the paper that was published about those observations:

http://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102

Once the answer above is quite straightforward! What the paper says (in short) is that LIGO has observed a transient gravitational-wave signal, and these observations match with the predictions of waveform derived by General Relativity for the system involving two black holes.

Herr Schrödinger
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Welcome to Astronomy! However, link only answers are usually dis encouraged. If you have something new to add, please sum it up in a few paragraphs.
Hohmannfan
LIGO update: Rumors are out .. sciencenews.org/article/… .. that LIGO may have observed two colliding neutron stars. This would be significant since it could be the first time that gravitational waves and electromagnetic waves are seen from the same source.
Jack R. Woods