Oleg Zabluda's blog
Saturday, October 15, 2016
 
Physicists think gravitational waves might permanently alter spacetime
Physicists think gravitational waves might permanently alter spacetime
Whoa.
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The idea of gravitational-wave memory was first predicted by Russian scientists back in 1974, but seeing as no one had even confirmed the existence of gravitational waves back then, it went largely unnoticed.
[...]
To explain gravitational-wave memory, Lasky uses the example of two black holes orbiting each other before they eventually merge, and two astronauts drifting side by side in orbit around this black hole binary system. [...] After the black holes collide and merge, the gravitational waves will stop, and the astronauts' distance will once again be constant - but not the same as the original distance. [“slightly more or slightly less,”]
[...]
This effect would hypothetically be detected as an additional flare of gravitational waves near the end of the initial event. [...] "In general, we expect the size of the memory effect to be between about one-tenth and one-hundredth of that of the gravitational waves," Lasky told PBS. "For almost all events other than the most catastrophic collisions in spacetime, the effect cannot be measured." [...] But Lasky and his team have now come up with a way that it could work - and it all comes down to volume. [...] "Our work has shown that the combination of all these mergers will enable us to measure the memory effect over time," [...] after observing 35 to 90 mergers as dramatic as the one back in February, but if the observatory becomes more sensitive, it might happen even sooner.
[...]
"This is a very clever way of measuring gravitational-wave memory and exploring it observationally," LIGO co-founder Kip Thorne said [...] "I never thought it’d be possible with LIGO."
"""
http://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-think-gravitational-waves-might-permanently-alter-spacetime
http://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-think-gravitational-waves-might-permanently-alter-spacetime

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