Thursday Feb 11th will likely go down in scientific history as the formal announcement of the widely-leaked and hinted-at first detection of gravitational waves.
The LIGO gravitational wave team is having a press conference on Thursday at 10:30am EST to announce the widely expected to result in Nobel Prizes first detection of gravitational waves.
The LIGO team's press release notes:
(Washington, DC) -- Journalists are invited to join the National Science Foundation as it brings together the scientists from Caltech, MIT and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) this Thursday at 10:30 a.m. at the National Press Club for a status report on the effort to detect gravitational waves - or ripples in the fabric of spacetime - using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO).
Do any Soylentils have the "secret" URL for the webcast? Please don't do anything stupid on this historic occasion, but it would be cool to watch history being made. Its kind of the physics equivalent of a moon rocket launch. It's very widely leaked that history will be made Thursday morning... wouldn't you like to see it?
Backreaction has everything you need to know about gravitational waves for preparation for the webcast.
It's an exciting time to be alive! On the other hand, if the endless leaks and insinuations are bogus, its also an exciting time to be pissed off, too.
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As expected, gravitational waves, which were predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago, have been detected by the LIGO Collaboration:
Scientists are claiming a stunning discovery in their quest to fully understand gravity. They have observed the warping of space-time generated by the collision of two black holes more than a billion light-years from Earth. The international team says the first detection of these gravitational waves will usher in a new era for astronomy.
It is the culmination of decades of searching and could ultimately offer a window on the Big Bang. The research, by the LIGO Collaboration, has been accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters. The collaboration operates a number of labs around the world that fire lasers through long tunnels, trying to sense ripples in the fabric of space-time. Expected signals are extremely subtle, and disturb the machines, known as interferometers, by just fractions of the width of an atom. But the black hole merger was picked up by two widely separated LIGO facilities in the US.
The historic paper in question: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger (open, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102)
Archived video of the press conference webcast will be available here.
NASA provided an infographic for their Astronomy Picture of the Day feature with details about the discovery.
Also at NPR, NYT, Scientific American, and Ars Technica Live, The New Yorker. BBC's Jonathan Amos offers an analysis of the discovery.
(Score: 1) by rickatech on Thursday February 11 2016, @08:23AM
Strip the Cosmos has some nice images and onsite visit to LIGO compound and staff from back in 2014 when data collection results were still too new to make any announcements
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4205402/?ref_=ttep_ep1 [imdb.com]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 11 2016, @08:27AM
Gravitational waves are a myth! It's all just a bunch of supermassive niggers doing a nigger dance.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 11 2016, @10:53AM
Sorry, why did some dickhead mod this "funny"? I thought this place was meant to be better than Slashdot.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Thursday February 11 2016, @01:25PM
Because some trolls are too lazy to type and troll using their mod-points instead.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 11 2016, @01:28PM
yo'mama, I assume, together with ten of your most likely dads?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 11 2016, @10:39AM
Next they'll be saying that it's possible to travel faster than light, which will cause the universe to implode because Einstein can't be proven wrong. Physics books being right is like the 5th Law of Scienceology.
(Score: 4, Informative) by sudo rm -rf on Thursday February 11 2016, @10:58AM
I don't have a secret URL, but it I find it noteworthy that NASA's APOD-feed (Astronomy Picture Of the Day) [nasa.gov] has a placeholder titled
"A new and exciting APOD will appear here today at 11:00 am Eastern Time (USA) [1] after the LIGO press conference in Washington, DC has begun." Illustration Credit: APOD's Place Holder Team :)
[1]btw that's 1600 UTC, five hours from the moment this comment is posted
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 11 2016, @11:25AM
Thank you. Posters should not assume that everyone here is familiar with US time zones. However given the audience here, almost everyone well know how to convert UTC to their local time zone.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 11 2016, @11:27AM
Err … s/well/will/
Reminder to self: Preview!
(And damn the 2 minute forced wait!)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 11 2016, @03:27PM
posted [youtube.com]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday February 11 2016, @04:02PM
Yup. Excellent. An historic first.
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160211.html [nasa.gov] - LIGO Detects Gravitational Waves from Merging Black Holes
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday February 11 2016, @01:53PM
According to the LIGO Announcement [ligo.org]:
I'm guessing they're limiting access via a registration link (it is at the National Press Club, which does provide webcast services [press.org]), hence the media contacts.
Hopefully, they're putting it on a delay and will show the news conference at the previously posted NASA APOD [nasa.gov] page. We can hope, at least.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 11 2016, @03:37PM
How about they publish the evidence and reasoning so people can discuss it? Also, wait for independant verification rather than unilaterally declaring themselves VIPs? The way this whole gravitiaional waves thing has been handled really disturbs me. They should be acting extra carefully right now. The replication crisis in other fields is slowly revealing to the public that academia is currently very sick. I thought physics was still ok but its looking like thats not so. When the hard questions finally do get asked they will lose their funding with the rest it looks like.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 11 2016, @03:42PM
WTF are you talking about?? They have been careful. They've been working on this since at least as far back as November when the rumors first started flying around. Now they've done analysis and have results to present. Now they're presenting them. Now other people can look at their work and critique it. This is how science works. Because of what they say they've seen, it gets a lot of press, but this is exactly how the process works. It's just that most people don't get worked up about the typical papers that get published.
So they're supposed not report anything? Or they're supposed to wait 20 years for someone else to build a LIGO equivalent? What is your point again?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 11 2016, @03:58PM
Yes, they are supposed to publish before giving interviews or holding press conferences. It is not a difficult concept.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 11 2016, @04:05PM
they did publish a PRL, which did go through peer review.
the press conference coincides with the publication itself because that's the way that news works in the internet era.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 11 2016, @07:28PM
Thanks, my (totally legitimate and not wackjob) concern that this was a press conference before publication has been addressed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 11 2016, @05:02PM
They did, you dipshit. Apparently problems with conceptual issues lies with you, to which we can add "spouts off drivel and looks like an idiot".
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday February 11 2016, @04:19PM
Wow, the anti-science wackjobs are really coming out of the woodwork for this one!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 11 2016, @07:43PM
I am the exact opposite, I am so pro-science that bad behavior concerns me. Premature media frenzy stuff hurts the image of science, and it does happen, even happened less than 2 years ago regarding this exact topic! Here is a video of a press conference held before publishing regarding the detection of gravitational waves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iasqtm1prlI [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday February 11 2016, @03:50PM
Confirmed baby! [nytimes.com]
With the usual caveats...
(Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Thursday February 11 2016, @03:51PM
NSF:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7293kAiPZw [youtube.com]
CERN:
https://indico.cern.ch/event/496299/ [indico.cern.ch]
https://webcast.web.cern.ch/webcast/play.php?event=496299 [web.cern.ch]