In 2017, astronomers witnessed the birth of a black hole for the first time. Gravitational wave detectors picked up the ripples in spacetime caused by two neutron stars colliding to form the black hole, and other telescopes then observed the resulting explosion.
But the real nitty-gritty of how the black hole formed, the movements of matter in the instants before it was sealed away inside the black hole's event horizon, went unobserved. That's because the gravitational waves thrown off in these final moments had such a high frequency that our current detectors can't pick them up.
If you could observe ordinary matter as it turns into a black hole, you would be seeing something similar to the Big Bang played backwards. The scientists who design gravitational wave detectors have been hard at work to figure out how improve our detectors to make it possible.
Today our team is publishing a paper that shows how this can be done. Our proposal could make detectors 40 times more sensitive to the high frequencies we need, allowing astronomers to listen to matter as it forms a black hole.
[...] Five years ago physicists realised you could solve the problem of insufficient sensitivity at high frequency with devices that combine phonons with photons. They showed that devices in which energy is carried in quantum packets that share the properties of both phonons and photons can have quite remarkable properties.
These devices would involve a radical change to a familiar concept called "resonant amplification". Resonant amplification is what you do when you push a playground swing: if you push at the right time, all your small pushes create big swinging.
The new device, called a "white light cavity", would amplify all frequencies equally. This is like a swing that you could push any old time and still end up with big results.
However, nobody has yet worked out how to make one of these devices, because the phonons inside it would be overwhelmed by random vibrations caused by heat.
In our paper, published in Communications Physics, we show how two different projects currently under way could do the job.
[...] Astrophysicists have predicted complex gravitational waveforms created by the convulsions of neutron stars as they form black holes. These gravitational waves could allow us to listen in to the nuclear physics of a collapsing neutron star.
For example, it has been shown that they can clearly reveal whether the neutrons in the star remain as neutrons or whether they break up into a sea of quarks, the tiniest subatomic particles of all. If we could observe neutrons turning into quarks and then disappearing into the black hole singularity, it would be the exact reverse of the Big Bang where out of the singularity, the particles emerged which went on to create our universe.
Journal References:
1.) Michael A. Page, Maxim Goryachev, Haixing Miao, et al. Gravitational wave detectors with broadband high frequency sensitivity [open], Communications Physics (DOI: 10.1038/s42005-021-00526-2)
2.) Haixing Miao, Yiqiu Ma, Chunnong Zhao, et al. Enhancing the Bandwidth of Gravitational-Wave Detectors with Unstable Optomechanical Filters, Physical Review Letters (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.211104)
3.) Paul J. Easter, Paul D. Lasky, Andrew R. Casey, et al. Computing fast and reliable gravitational waveforms of binary neutron star merger remnants, Physical Review D (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.100.043005)
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 17 2021, @06:53AM
* TPTB want you to forget about TempleOS and the idea of "do it yourself" software, unless of course it's software THEY control! And the idea of "no networking" is peace of mind in the times of Internet of Things and everything connecting to the beast, I mean internet. Men in high and low places harassed this man and may have intentionally led to his death, in my opinion.
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Terry A. Davis: The Movie!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 17 2021, @01:06PM (1 child)
OK, can anyone smart provide an explanation? This just sounds like juju to me, resonance at any frequency??
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 17 2021, @03:29PM
Extreme broad-band modal resonances [wikipedia.org] at singularity. If it doesn't seem intuitive enough a proposition to accept at face value - you can always do the math ;P
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 17 2021, @03:42PM (1 child)
Does this come shaped like a skull, and would Dr. Jones be interested?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 17 2021, @03:55PM
Don't we have to nuke the fridge to find out?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 17 2021, @09:24PM (1 child)
Could have scored an Astrophysics Bingo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2021, @03:40AM
Not enough "quantum".