The detection of gravitational waves – a triumph of science enabled by fossil fuels

wattsupwiththat.com ^ | February 17, 2016 | Anthony Watts

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Anthony Watts / 3 days ago February 17, 2016

Last week, the science world was abuzz with the news that gravitational waves had been discovered thanks to the LIGO project and the team of international scientists that made it possible. At WUWT, I covered the story here, saying that it was a “triumph of science”. Indeed it was, and still is, and the effects of this discovery on science will ripple into the future for decades and centuries to come.

I woke in the middle of the night as I sometimes do, for no particular reason except that my brain doesn’t always cooperate with my body when it comes time to sleep, and the LIGO project was on my mind, partly due to an email I got from a fellow who wanted to tell me about a colleague in China who was talking about Gravitons and the LIGO announcement here. It got me was thinking about how wonderful it was that we could detect a gravitational wave from the merging of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago:

A computer simulation shows the collision of two black holes, a tremendously powerful event detected for the first time ever by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO. LIGO detected gravitational waves, or ripples in space and time generated as the black holes spiraled in toward each other, collided, and merged. This simulation shows how the merger would appear to our eyes if we could somehow travel in a spaceship for a closer look. It was created by solving equations from Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity using the LIGO data.

The two merging black holes are each roughly 30 times the mass of the sun, with one slightly larger than the other. Time has been slowed down by a factor of about 100. The event took place 1.3 billion years ago.

The stars appear warped due to the incredibly strong gravity of the black holes. The black holes warp space and time, and this causes light from the stars to curve around the black holes in a process called gravitational lensing. The ring around the black holes, known as an Einstein ring, arises from the light of all the stars in a small region behind the holes, where gravitational lensing has smeared their images into a ring.

The gravitational waves themselves would not be seen by a human near the black holes and so do not show in this video, with one important exception. The gravitational waves that are traveling outward toward the small region behind the black holes disturb that region’s stellar images in the Einstein ring, causing them to slosh around, even long after the collision. The gravitational waves traveling in other directions cause weaker, and shorter-lived sloshing, everywhere outside the ring.

Wikipedia’a article on LIGO notes that on 11 February 2016, the LIGO and Virgo collaborations announced the first observation of a gravitational wave.The signal was named GW150914.The waveform showed up on 14 September 2015, within just two days of when the Advanced LIGO detectors started collecting data after their upgrade. It matched the predictions of general relativity for the inward spiral and merger of a pair of black holesand subsequent ‘ringdown’ of the resulting single black hole. The observations demonstrated the existence of binary stellar-mass black hole systems and the first observation of a binary black hole merger.

Image Credit: Caltech/MIT/LIGO Lab
These plots show the signals of gravitational waves detected by the twin LIGO observatories at Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington. The signals came from two merging black holes, each about 30 times the mass of our sun, lying 1.3 billion light-years away. The top two plots show data received at Livingston and Hanford, along with the predicted shapes for the waveform. These predicted waveforms show what two merging black holes should look like according to the equations of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, along with the instrument’s ever-present noise. Time is plotted on the X-axis and strain on the Y-axis. Strain represents the fractional amount by which distances are distorted. As the plots reveal, the LIGO data very closely match Einstein’s predictions. The final plot compares data from both detectors. The Hanford data have been inverted for comparison, due to the differences in orientation of the detectors at the two sites. The data were also shifted to correct for the travel time of the gravitational-wave signals between Livingston and Hanford (the signal first reached Livingston, and then, traveling at the speed of light, reached Hanford seven thousandths of a second later). As the plot demonstrates, both detectors witnessed the same event, confirming the detection.

This is indeed a wonderful and marvelous thing, as is the dual LIGO observatory itself; one in Hanford, WA and the other in Livingston, LA, two identical observatories separated by 3,002 kilometers (1,865 miles) so that this distance corresponds to a difference in gravitational wave arrival times of up to ten milliseconds, making it possible to do triangulation to determine an approximate location.

LIGO observatories, left, Hanford, WA, right Livingston, LA

Wikipedia also had this note about the facility and it’s history:

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) is a large-scale physics experiment and observatory to detect gravitational waves. Cofounded in 1992 by Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever of Caltechand Rainer Weiss of MIT, LIGO is a joint project between scientists at MIT, Caltech, and many other colleges and universities. Scientists involved in the project and the analysis of the data for gravitational-wave astronomyare organised by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration which includes more than 900 scientists worldwide, as well as 44,000 active Einstein@Home users. LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), with important contributions from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, the Max Planck Society of Germany, and the Australian Research Council. By mid-September 2015 “the world’s largest gravitational-wave facility” completed a 5-year US$200-million overhaul at a total cost of $620 million.

That’s quite an endeavor, combining global collaboration, two large nearly identical facilities, and decades of research and construction. It struck me that it wasn’t just human energy that went into making LIGO a reality, but scads of real energy, to support design, construction, and operation of LIGO over that time.

Speaking of construction, here’s a photo from 2011, showing what looks to be a vacuum vessel being offloaded from a semi truck by a portable crane truck. Obviously, the vessel was built elsewhere and trucked in, and you can say that about essentially every aspect of the two observatories, as there was nothing but barren land in their place before.

Workers prepare to install equipment at the LIGO facility in Hanford, Washington, in 2011.

It looks like one of these units:

Imagine the energy involved, not just in construction and transportation to the site by truck, but in maintaining a near perfect vacuum in the 4KM dual legs of the observatory, such as the one seen below:

Northern leg of LIGO interferometer at Hanford, WA

The amount of power needed is substantial, and it must be clean and non-intermittent as this internal newsletter for the Livingston site suggests:

One of the challenges of our rural location is the availability of clean and stable electrical power. Initially we found our electrical supply experienced some instabilities. This prevented the proper operation of the air conditioning system and some of the vacuum pumps. As mentioned in Cecil Franklin’s article above, the local power company which supplies the observatory, DEMCO, has completed construction of a separate substation dedicated solely for LIGO use. This feature has dramatically improved the quality of electrical power and all electrical systems are now operational. In addition, this improvement significantly reduced power outages due to thunder and lightning storms. Thank you, DEMCO!

Imagine if the power goes out. How long would it take to re-establish the vacuum in that facility?

A quick look at DEMCO Electrical COOP in Louisiana says they use coal-fired power plants, such as:

The coal-fired Big Cajun Power Plant located in Pointe Coupee Parish was built jointly by Louisiana’s electric cooperatives in the 1970s to provide wholesale electrical power to cooperative members across the state. Today, the facility is owned by Louisiana Generating, a subsidiary of NRG Energy.

And, a plot of power generation sources in Louisiana suggests that fossil fuel (coal and gas) and nuclear power make up the lion’s share of power generation in the state:

For the Hanford LIGO site, the Washington state power generation balance is different, using more hydro than coal or gas:

The point here is that LIGO couldn’t operate without a stable power supply, and couldn’t run on a power grid fed primarily on solar or wind, but instead uses the most hated power generation methods of environmentalists; coal, gas, nuclear, and hydro. Try doing this sort of science with intermittent solar and wind power – you can’t.

This need for stable power to run LIGO may have been a factor as to why the Pasadena, CA based California Institute of Technology chose to put observatories outside of California, where the vagaries of wind and sunshine wouldn’t affect the grid, and they wouldn’t have to worry about environmental political issues as much.

And it seems, the LIGO staff are big fossil fuel enthusiasts themselves, where in Hanford, they have a hot-rod club at the Lab:

Don’t tell the EPA.

[Elsiejay]

Does this effect affect measurements of the weights of bodies, as, for example, my own glorious body at rest on a scale?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Don’t think so, you are too small.

[Mr. K]

yes it would, but it would be so tiny you would never feel it

[PIF]

Washington enviro-wackos want to contiune to tear down hydro dams ...

[Praxeologue]

Put another way, had the EPA had its way for the past forty years, this discovery would not have occurred.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Ernest. This is a nice two-fer, as LIGO is also enables archaeology. Good Digest topic ping as well.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Ernest!

---

· String Theory Ping List ·

---

---

· Join · Bookmark · Topics · Google ·
· View or Post in 'blog · post a topic · subscribe ·

---

[Foundahardheadedwoman]

Why? Don’t make no sense to me.

[PIF]

Dams kill salmon. Enviro-wackos never make sense ... don’t even try. Their basic goal is to return most of the US to the 14th Century, except for enclaves (Argos) which would house all the people, the countryside only available by special permit, unless one belonged to the privileged elite on their vast estates (see Ted Turner’s holdings - measured in 10s of square miles).

Most of the largest hydo-dams are on the Columbia River. The river used to be the spawning grounds of the largest Sockeye salmon run in the world, followed by Bristol Bay, Alaska, and in third place the Frazier River, Vancouver Canada. I don’t recall the numbers accurately any longer by I believe the Colombia run average was around 52 million, Bristol Bay around 35 million, and Frazier was 16 million Sockeye returning each year. There are, of course, other salmon species in each of the rivers: king(Chinook), sliver (Coho), pink (Humpie), and chum (Keta/Dog).

In the 30’s under FDR (D), it was decided to dam the Columbia to generate power for the west coast. Commercial fishermen protested saying that the salmon would be killed. “Nonsense,” said the Feds. And proceeded to build the dams killing the fish - the adults could no longer go up river to spawn, and the juveniles coming down were ground up in the turbines. And so a major US food source was destroyed - perhaps akin to the use of corn to make fuel.

Various experiments have been tried since with mixed results, but the river remains mostly barren.

Now the wackos want to tear the dams down. However, over the decades silt has built up behind the dams and, once breached, all that silt will come down river, burring the salmon spawning grounds under 10s of feet of silt. Not only would most of the northwest coast be without a major source of power for years, but it would be decades before the river cleared enough to have any fish in it.

Boeing would be forced to leave Seattle, dealing another major blow to Washington’s economy. The silicon people like M$ would be limited to times when there was enough power to work. They would eventually leave also. Both the Timber and Commercial fishing industries (having already suffered the Enviro predation are mere shadows of what they once were) would be unable to continue.

California would be without backup power and feel the effects with higher electrical rates ... and so on.