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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 15 2020, @06:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the like-a-christmas-tree dept.

An 'unknown' burst of gravitational waves just lit up Earth's detectors:

Earth's gravitational wave observatories -- which hunt for ripples in the fabric of space-time -- just picked up something weird. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo detectors recorded an unknown or unanticipated "burst" of gravitational waves on Jan. 14.

The gravitational waves we've detected so far usually relate to extreme cosmic events, like two black holes colliding or neutron stars finally merging after being caught in a death spiral. Burst gravitational waves have not been detected before and scientists hypothesize they may be linked to phenomena such as supernova or gamma ray bursts, producing a tiny "pop" when detected by the observatories.

This unanticipated burst has been dubbed, for now, S200114f, and was detected by the software that helped confirm the first detection of gravitational waves.

[...] Astronomers have already swung their telescopes to the interesting portion of the sky, listening in across different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum for a whisper of what might have occurred.

Previously:
LIGO Observes Lower Mass Black Hole Collision
First Joint Detection of Gravitational Waves by LIGO and Virgo
LIGO May Have Detected Merging Neutron Stars for the First Time
GW170104: Observation of a 50-Solar-Mass Binary Black Hole Coalescence at Redshift 0.2
Europe's "Virgo" Gravitational Wave Detector Suffers From "Microcracks"
LIGO Black Hole Echoes Hint at General-Relativity Breakdown
LIGO Data Probes Where General Relativity Might Break Down
Did the LIGO Gravitational Wave Detector Find Dark Matter?
Second Detection of Gravitational Waves Announced by LIGO


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @04:28AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @04:28AM (#943898)

    hit send too soon, Here's the 3rd detector:
    http://www.virgo-gw.eu/ [virgo-gw.eu] it's in Italy, the two LIGO installations are in USA.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @04:53AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @04:53AM (#943905)

    Taal Volcano, Philippines: 14°0′36″N 120°59′51″E 
    Pisa, Italy: 43.6313°N 10.5045°E
    Hanford, USA: 46°27′18.52″N 119°24′27.56″W
    Livingston, USA: 30°33′46.42″N 90°46′27.27″W

    Taal -> Virgo = 10, 503 km
    Taal -> Hanford = 10,989 km
    Taal -> Livingston = 13,996 km

    I just used this as an example but they are very close to equidistant. At 7 km/s the delay would be 5-6 min. But we see that is just an average, in realty the speed depends upon the rock type. It can vary from 1.8 km/s to 7.3 km/s, a factor of 4.5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-wave [wikipedia.org]

    But to repeat, I am in no way attached to this Philippines example. I don't see why some other event couldn't occur deep in the earth and trigger a volcano though. That event could also be equidistant (in terms of travel time).

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by D2 on Thursday January 16 2020, @09:58PM (1 child)

      by D2 (5107) on Thursday January 16 2020, @09:58PM (#944262)

      Um... P waves are a direct path. And are followed by S waves that travel at a different velocity so each such wave pair gives a seismometer an estimated distance to the origin.

      Armchair physics by AC's often boils down to someone thinking their first moment considering a problem is wiser than a symposium of scientists that have studied it for decades.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18 2020, @12:27PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18 2020, @12:27PM (#944943)

        Nothing stops multiple tremors happening all over the globe to create false positives, you don't need a single event hitting all three (that would actually be easily thrown out as it would get weaker with distance travelled), multiple events could easily align to hit all three, like 99% of their work is discarding false positives