Large Hardon Collider

[Inshiya]

A whole .1 seconds of stable plasma!

And I use the word stable loosely.

[myreality]

A whole .1 seconds of stable plasma!

And I use the word stable loosely.

Link?

[Kyreth]

A whole .1 seconds of stable plasma!

And I use the word stable loosely.

IIRC, this was supposed to be a short burst test and they're using helium vs. hydrogen for the fuel. Still, it isn't a billion-dollar pile of scrap.

[BerenTebogo]

Updates in the world of science! Both are in the field I'm working in (leaving) and both are very exciting.

First: Announcement from LIGO tomorrow, which is the department I am currently attached to at LSU. It will be livestreamed. It is expected that this will be the first confirmed detection of gravitational waves in the history of humanity. Here is the press release from LSU/LIGO.

Scientists to Provide Update on the Search for Gravitational Waves on Feb. 11

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 8, 2016



BATON ROUGE and LIVINGSTON, LA – Journalists are invited to join members of LIGO Livingston and LSU for a live viewing event as the National Science Foundation brings together scientists from Caltech, MIT and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration this Thursday, Feb. 11, at 9:30 a.m. CST at the National Press Club, or NPC, 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, or LIGO.

The LIGO Livingston Observatory will host a press conference at that time, and will show the main half-hour network-streamed NPC conference to the press, LIGO scientists and engineers, representatives from regional collaborating universities, community partners and political offices. Immediately afterwards, a local program focusing on Louisiana’s role in LIGO and LIGO’s contributions locally will be presented. Scientists will be on hand to answer questions, provide guided tours and interviews.

A simultaneous screening event will be held on campus at LSU’s 130 Nicholson Hall in Baton Rouge. LSU Physics & Astronomy faculty will be on hand to answer questions.

Members of the media are invited to all of the events. Please RSVP to the contact listed below the event location:



WHEN: Thursday, Feb. 11
9:30 a.m. CST

Doors open 9 a.m. for media to setup

LIGO, a system of two identical detectors carefully constructed to detect incredibly tiny vibrations from passing gravitational waves, was conceived and originally built by MIT and Caltech researchers and funded by the National Science Foundation, with significant contributions from other U.S. and international partners including LSU. The twin detectors are located 1,865 miles apart in Livingston, La., and Hanford, Wash.

LSU is a major participant in the LIGO experiment. LSU Physics & Astronomy Department Professor Joseph Giaime is LIGO Livingston Observatory Head, and LSU Professor Gabriela González is spokesperson and leads the 15-nation international LIGO Science Collaboration with more than 1,000 scientists working on the project. González will be a featured speaker describing the science results at the Washington, D.C., press conference. The LIGO lab in Livingston is also located on LSU property.

For those unable to travel to the observatory, the LSU Physics & Astronomy Department will also show a live stream of the announcement on campus in Nicholson Hall room 130, including a panel discussion with LSU research faculty.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the first publication of Albert Einstein’s prediction of the existence of gravitational waves. With interest in this topic piqued by the centennial, the group will discuss their ongoing efforts to observe and measure cosmic gravitational waves for scientific research.

Additional links:

LIGO Livingston: https://ligo.caltech.edu/LA
LIGO Scientific Collaboration: http://www.ligo.org/
LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy: http://www.phys.lsu.edu/newwebsite/r...elativity.html

Secondly, also in the vein of black holes: My undergraduate research adviser has simulated the behavior of a particle inside of the event horizon of a rotating black hole for the first time ever.

http://www.umassd.edu/news/insideablackhole.html
http://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract...RevD.93.041501

“This has never been done before, although there has been lots of speculation for decades on what actually happens inside a black hole,” Dr. Khanna said. “The problem is very challenging — requiring development of many new mathematical and computational techniques. I expect this to be a new additional area of focus for my research program over the next several years.”

“Non-rotating black holes have been studied in computer simulations for decades,” Dr. Burko said. “We developed a first-of-its-kind computer simulation of how physical fields evolve on the approach to the center of a rotating black hole. It has often been assumed that objects approaching a black hole are crushed by the increasing gravity. However, we found that while gravitational forces increase and become infinite, they do so fast enough that their interaction allows physical objects to stay intact as they move toward the center of the black hole.”

This is the research I will most likely be working on if I continue my PhD while working full time back in MA.

[Churchill]

Were the gravitational waves detected from the two pulsars orbiting each other not confirmed or am I missing something

[BerenTebogo]

Were the gravitational waves detected from the two pulsars orbiting each other not confirmed or am I missing something

No, it was not a confirmed thing. Was a "we think what we're seeing is GW but idklol". Unsure if the announcement will be re: that system or independent. Cards are being held very close to vest, even my friend who work on the actual LIGO site don't know for sure.

[kuronosan]

Holy crap, that's fascinating.

[Churchill]

should tell your friends to stop being gays. It's not like LIGO is going to come out and announce they found life on another planet, their mission is pretty well defined.

It would be like the Kepler team having a secret press conference where they definitely weren't going to be talking about finding distant exo-planets guise

[BerenTebogo]

should tell your friends to stop being gays. It's not like LIGO is going to come out and announce they found life on another planet, their mission is pretty well defined.

It would be like the Kepler team having a secret press conference where they definitely weren't going to be talking about finding distant exo-planets guise

I know, I've already expressed my thoughts that it is stupid - especially given the possibility that it's not a solid confirmation, it's something else. Like all those times NASA has a BIG ANNOUNCEMENT and it's something cool but not worth the country grinding to a halt over which it did because ALIENS.

But it will be one of the most defining moments in physics and really all of science of over the course of human history when the detection is announced, so it is important even if we think it is inevitable. We're talking about the first step towards collecting data from beyond the cosmic microwave background here. The /potential/ to collect observational data on physics that defies all of our models, both quantum and relativistic, is pretty neat.

It's kinda like discovering that the electromagnetic spectrum goes on further than we thought and that there is cool stuff we can only see when we look in that new area.

http://phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1853

[BerenTebogo]

Confirmed detection. 29 and 36 solar mass black hole binary system.

It's a brave new world.

[Enedin]

GRAVITTYYYYY

[Salodin]

So when can we start looking for worm holes?

[BaneTheBrawler]

When Daniel gets off his ass and finds the damn cartouche.


So binary black hole... two black holes orbiting a center of mass?

[BerenTebogo]

Correct bane. Almost the exact same dynamics as a binary star system just without gas accretion and obviously much higher gravitational forces.

[BaneTheBrawler]

that's literally awesome. i wonder what it looks like... if anything. so 29 and 36 solar mass, is that a scale for measuring their density? can we do that now?

[BerenTebogo]

Black holes that aren't supermassive have a rough range of radii that they are within. Essentially we're talking that many solar masses in something that is a decent chunk smaller than the sun. We have good models of what it looks like, thanks to computers. I personally do waveform simulation, but there are people who do actual modeling of the collisions.



https://www.facebook.com/NatureNews/...96170123786830

[Kyreth]

Somewhere, Einstein is getting another laurel put on his ghostly head for this one. Every time someone says "We've reached the edges of what we can understand with science", something like this happens.

[BerenTebogo]

Also the resulting black hole system was only 62 msolar so 3 solar masses escaped as gravitational radiation.

Think about that.

3 suns taken and converted directly into gravitational energy then sent out as ripples throughout the universe. This merger happened about 1.3 billion years ago and still was able to distort the actual shape of the entire planet. Literally took the planet and distorted it enough that we could measure it.

Science.

[Waraji]

I really enjoyed reading the NY Times article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/sc...-einstein.html

[BerenTebogo]

Two of my friends who work on site (despite not actually doing ANYTHING for the project, their own words, not mine) got their names on the paper.

Fuckin' experimentalists.

The co-author section is seriously 2+ pages. If you breathed in a LIGO facility in September you got your name on this paper, lmao.