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  1. #21
    Ridill
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    We have completed one follow-up observation already. P.I. should be analyzing the data right now actually. Doing 3 more over this next week. I'll see what's up with the proprietary rights when the guys down the hall have some answers.

  2. #22
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    Hubble fucked up. They deleted the tweets about it but I guess they're slow to fix their FB page. It still isn't exactly "public" knowledge but since Hubble's twitter cron job shit the bed fuck it. https://www.facebook.com/spacetelelive/ Can check out 16 hours ago and yesterday 5am. We kept our twitter/fb feeds from updating with this info because we're not bad, but there's still no way around the fact that if you know where to look the observing schedules for all these telescopes is required to be 100% public. See our more hidden site: http://chandraobservatory.herokuapp.com/obsid/18955

    Anyway, Fermi caught a GRB (which is the whole point of it) and at roughly the same time LIGO also detected a signal. The LIGO detection is still "secret" but like 90% of the EM spectrum observations are triggered by the specific event of "LIGO detection of blahblahblah" so, whatever. Binary neutron star merger only about 40 mpc away, which is INCREDIBLY close. The thing about NS-NS mergers is that due to the much smaller mass (compared to stellar mass black holes) the only way LIGO ever stood a chance of detecting them is by getting a YOLO lucky detection in a REALLY close area to Earth (see above). Recently there's been a lot of talk that LIGO may never actually be able to see NS-NS mergers just because of the ridiculous probabilities involved.

    So here we are. Sample size going from 0 to 1. It's incredibly different from the BH-BH detections, despite it still being a LIGO detection. This is going to possibly be the first ever physical insight into the equation of state of neutron stars, something that is an outstanding problem in astrophysics all the way down to nuclear and particle physics.

    Also, fwiw, the detection happened just a few days before LIGO goes offline for a year to get down to full operating specs.

    Hubble's fuck-up has already led to this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startsw.../#172d0acb6fbd

    God damn I'm cracking up.

  3. #23
    Ridill
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    Also, for the inevitable "why bother keeping it a secret? why is it a big deal?" questions:

    Consider this, this detection is brand new science. Astronomers and physicists all over the world are scrambling to point every available resource at that area of the sky to hopefully catch something in the EM spectrum and officially open up the era of mulit-messenger GW astronomy. Not only is this incredibly stressful and time-sensitive, but like any experiment, there is always the possibility that we won't see fuck all in any spectrum.

    The fact is we have zero experience with this type of thing. The flux may decay too fast to the point that 12 hours was already too late, it may be too faint with respect to the host galaxy and it can't be properly resolved against the background noise, the poor localization of the Fermi detection could've meant everyone was looking just a bit off in the wrong way at the time it mattered, etc, etc, etc.

    But now this has blown up. It's in Forbes for fucks sake. Within the week it'll be the only thing anyone is sharing on facebook despite them having no idea why. There will be articles about how the signals are really aliens, there will be articles about what this will mean for your chakras, and there will be shittily written science articles by lib. arts majors. There will be an intense amount of focus and scrutiny on this observation from the public and IF it turns out that no follow-up detection happens, then there will be the usual public fallout of "why do we fund these billion dollar projects if they cant even see anything" from people who didn't know the projects existed last week.

    I find the whole thing pretty funny, but in like a "you guys are fucking retarded and should be fired but lmao what a way to leak it" sort of way.

  4. #24
    Ridill
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    God bless the internet.

  5. #25
    Ridill
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    So is my winning lotto ticket in these signals or what?

  6. #26
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    Quote Originally Posted by kareface View Post
    Is it possible you are detecting a gamma-ray burst from a source triangulated using data from Ligo? I'm not as up with astrophysics so I don't know if a merger of black holes would produce a gamma-ray burst. Just a guess, I know g-wave astrophysics is hot right now.
    I was on the money, I was just off by the source of the signal.

    That's amazing Sath! It's fucking mind-blowing if you really break it down. G-wave physics was predicted by Einstein, and yet we haven't been able to detect it until very recently. Now, using small successive perturbations of space created by gravity waves we can detect large scale astronomical events (even if no light from the event even reaches us). Then we use multiple Ligo sites to do rough triangularization of the event and point our telescopes out there to catch the light. I can't wait for the other Ligo sites to come online so it'll be possible to refine the source of the signal further. But, you know, global warming is a myth.

  7. #27

    Sweaty Dick Punching Enthusiast

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    Amazing stuff. I'm happy for you Sath, being at the front of new science is gonna be pretty fantastic.

    Also thank goodness for human incompetence and social media. Science blue balls aren't fun either.

  8. #28
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    Cargill Inc, Bill Gates, & Richard Branson announce plans to make lab-created meat to cut down on Cruelty to Animals
    Cargill Inc., the Minnetonka-based global agricultural giant, has joined Bill Gates and other businesses to invest in a nascent technology to make meat from self-producing animal cells amid rising consumer demand for protein that's less reliant on feed, land and water. Memphis Meats, which produces beef, chicken and duck directly from animal cells without raising and slaughtering livestock or poultry, raised $17 million from investors including Cargill, Gates and billionaire Richard Branson, according to a statement Tuesday on the San Francisco-based startup's website.
    http://www.startribune.com/cargill-b...ter/441533563/

  9. #29
    I'll change yer fuckin rate you derivative piece of shit
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    Quote Originally Posted by SathFenrir View Post
    Hubble's fuck-up has already led to this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startsw.../#172d0acb6fbd

    God damn I'm cracking up.
    The merger of two neutron stars should result in a giant release of energy, and a spectacular reaction which creates the majority of the ultra-heavy elements in the Universe, as each one is speculated to create about a thousand Earth-masses worth of heavy elements that go beyond iron in the periodic table.
    jesus christ

  10. #30
    I'll change yer fuckin rate you derivative piece of shit
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    Quote Originally Posted by 6souls View Post
    Cargill Inc, Bill Gates, & Richard Branson announce plans to make lab-created meat to cut down on Cruelty to Animals


    http://www.startribune.com/cargill-b...ter/441533563/
    Dope, but I care less about the cruelty and more about how horrible beef raising is for the environment. Focus on that, stop with the ducks and chickens!

  11. #31
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    I thought this thread might be the best place to post this. Not trying to make it political at all, but just a promising observation:

    Anywho, I feel like every other week I check my Twitter, Mike Pence is at NASA or doing speeches about NASA or there’s some post about him supporting moon and mars travel and etc etc. While Trump has been making headlines daily for various reasons, Pence has been very quietly and strongly supporting NASA which has been kind of nice. Makes me wonder if should he hypothetically ever take over the Presidency, that US government support for NASA would increase quite a bit

  12. #32

    he just wants us to colonize mars so he can have his gay-free utopia.

  13. #33

    Sweaty Dick Punching Enthusiast

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    Quote Originally Posted by Vaspinne View Post
    I thought this thread might be the best place to post this. Not trying to make it political at all, but just a promising observation:

    Anywho, I feel like every other week I check my Twitter, Mike Pence is at NASA or doing speeches about NASA or there’s some post about him supporting moon and mars travel and etc etc. While Trump has been making headlines daily for various reasons, Pence has been very quietly and strongly supporting NASA which has been kind of nice. Makes me wonder if should he hypothetically ever take over the Presidency, that US government support for NASA would increase quite a bit
    the Republican Congress actually increased NASA's budget for the last 3 years of Obama's presidency, including providing funding beyond what Obama called for. and even in Trump's cut-happy budget NASA was one of the few federal agencies to escape intact.

    it's probably not for the best of reasons, some combination of NASA having a lot of facilities in Republican districts and hoo-rah American-owns-spaceism, but it is refreshing to see a party that is often hostile to science embrace it so eagerly in at least one avenue. and as you say the vice-president has taken more of an interest in space travel than any major figure in DC has in a long time, he is even heading a newly reconstituted National Space Council that had been disbanded since 1993.

  14. #34
    Brokage
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    It's a nice glimmer of hope in what has been a pretty bleak presidential term thus far

  15. #35
    Ridill
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    I was gathered up with a bunch of the CfA people watching so I didn't get to post earlier but

    https://www.youtube.com/c/VideosatNSF/live

    Basically, LIGO has confirmed what I started this thread for. As of August 17th 2017 the era of multi-messenger astronomy has begun. Most likely the last large shift in ways we can look at the universe for a hundred years of more.

    The event was a binary neutron star collision of 1.1M and 1.6M solar masses.

    I'll talk more about it later and try to answer questions but there is part 2 of the livestream and I have a bunch to handle here because now the world knows that there was a huge delay in X-ray detection that is really fucking weird.

    Edit: Oh and we confirmed that R-process nucleosynthesis occurs in BNS collisions which is, you know, also pretty fucking huge. Another answer to a question that was up til this point only theorized with zero experimental evidence.

  16. #36
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  17. #37
    Ridill
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    And we have our own article up now too! http://chandra.si.edu/photo/2017/2nstars/

    Also, shameless self-promotion. https://youtu.be/AFxLA3RGjnc?t=2h5m4s This is the start of the discussion of our observations of the event.

  18. #38
    I'll change yer fuckin rate you derivative piece of shit
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    Since this is the only article I read or likely will read about this, Sath you should read it and tell me if it's horrendous science journalism or not.

    https://www.vox.com/science-and-heal...r-gold-alchemy

    Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

  19. #39

    funny, i thought the philosopher's stone would be a bit more...pocket sized.

  20. #40
    Ridill
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    Quote Originally Posted by archibaldcrane View Post
    Since this is the only article I read or likely will read about this, Sath you should read it and tell me if it's horrendous science journalism or not.

    https://www.vox.com/science-and-heal...r-gold-alchemy

    Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk
    It's a bit buzzword-y but honestly it's pretty accurate.

    It's really hard for me to properly emphasize how important this is, but you definitely should be taking notice. This is on the level of sequencing the human genome. R-process nucleosynthesis having at least 1 confirmed source as well as the start of the literal final frontier of astronomy and astrophysics in one go.

    The amount of astrophysics that exists as theoretical models and simulations only, for decades and decades, without a method of testing is enormous. As it is with all areas of physics. Multi-messenger astronomy is the key that can open pretty much every last door given enough time and accuracy. Cosmology, galactic formation, sub-atomic particle formation, heavy element synthesis, on and on and on.

    Make no mistake, physics changed today. As much, if not more, than it did with GW150914.

    Edit: It also highlights some points we really do take for granted in every day life. Before August 17th we couldn't actually prove where gold or platinum came from..

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