Detection of gravitational wave "orchestra" shows power of science

Since I subscribe to the online edition of the New York Times, I get frequent notifications of new stories on my iPhone. Some interest me. Some don't.

This morning it was a pleasure to be sent a story about how scientists were able to discover a background hum of gravitational waves, building on the first detection of these waves in 2015.

I've made a PDF file of the story, "The Cosmos is Thrumming With Gravitational Waves, Astronomers Find." It's well worth a read, having been written by a science reporter with a Ph.D. in particle physics. I'll share a few excerpts to whet your appetite for the whole story.
Download The Cosmos Is Thrumming With Gravitational Waves Astronomers Find - The New York Times

On Wednesday evening, an international consortium of research collaborations revealed compelling evidence for the existence of a low-pitch hum of gravitational waves reverberating across the universe.

The scientists strongly suspect that these gravitational waves are the collective echo of pairs of supermassive black holes — thousands of them, some as massive as a billion suns, sitting at the hearts of ancient galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away — as they slowly merge and generate ripples in space-time.

“I like to think of it as a choir, or an orchestra,” said Xavier Siemens, a physicist at Oregon State University who is part of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, or NANOGrav, collaboration, which led the effort. Each pair of supermassive black holes is generating a different note, Dr. Siemens said, “and what we’re receiving is the sum of all those signals at once.”

The findings were highly anticipated, coming more than 15 years after NANOGrav began taking data. Scientists said that, so far, the results were consistent with Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes how matter and energy warp space-time to create what we call gravity. As more data is gathered, this cosmic hum could help researchers understand how the universe achieved its current structure and perhaps reveal exotic types of matter that may have existed shortly after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

“The gravitational-wave background was always going to be the loudest, most obvious thing to find,” said Chiara Mingarelli, an astrophysicist at Yale University and a member of NANOGrav, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. “This is really just the beginning of a whole new way to observe the universe.”

...To detect the gravitational-wave background, researchers took advantage of the lighthouse-like nature of pulsars spread across the Milky Way. “Our detector isn’t something you can build in a lab or even launch into space,” said Thankful Cromartie, an astronomer at Cornell University, during Thursday’s news conference. “It’s closer to the size of the galaxy.”

Pulsars act like cosmic clocks, emitting beams of radio waves that can be periodically measured on Earth. Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts that as gravitational waves sweep past pulsars, they should expand and shrink the distance between these objects and Earth, changing the time it takes for the radio signals to arrive at observers. And if the gravitational-wave background is indeed everywhere, pulsars across the universe should be affected in a correlated way.

Rather than build a dedicated instrument, the NANOGrav team took advantage of existing radio telescopes around the world: the Very Large Array in New Mexico, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico (before its fateful collapse three years ago).

In 2020, after more than 12 years of gathering data, the NANOGrav team released results from monitoring the timing of 45 pulsars. Even then, Dr. Siemens said, the researchers saw tantalizing hints of a gravitational-wave background, but they needed to track more pulsars for longer amounts of time to confirm that they were indeed correlated, and to claim a discovery. So the NANOGrav team approached colleagues through the International Pulsar Timing Array — an umbrella organization that includes collaborations based in India, Europe, China and Australia — and coordinated an effort to uncover the gravitational-wave background together.

This discovery shows why I love science so much. 

The researchers showed amazing creativity, competence, and dedication. They produced a scientific instrument the size of a galaxy by using data from pulsars spread throughout our Milky Way galaxy. This required a tremendous amount of teamwork from scientists across the globe. 

It's mind-blowing enough that the general theory of relativity says that gravity is the warping of space-time, which often is described as being akin to placing a heavy object on a stretchy piece of rubber. The object distends the rubber, just as mass distends the fabric of space-time. 

But to discover gravitational waves that traverse the universe at the speed of light, given how faint evidence for those waves is, that's beyond mind-blowing. A story on Space.com describes the precision that had to be achieved.

In the new research, the "critical evidence" that betrays the source of the signals to be supermassive black holes is a unique pattern found in the arrival times of pulses from a galaxy-sized cosmic antenna of nearly 70 millisecond pulsars in the Milky Way, according to a consortium of astronomers known as The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav). Gravitational wave signals from black hole binaries overlap "like voices in a crowd" and result in an incessant hum that embeds as a unique pattern in the pulsar timing data, scientists say.

Scientists extracted that pattern by observing lighthouse-like beams from pairs of pulsars. Using various radio telescopes like the now-collapsed Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) in Canada, they collected data about the timing of those pulses every month for 15 years. Then, they calculated the difference between the pulses' actual arrival times and their predicted arrival times — which they could estimate within 1 microsecond, comparable to measuring the distance to the moon to within a thousandth of a millimeter, scientists say.

It amuses me when religiously-minded people say that scientists aren't interested in finding evidence for life after death, consciousness existing outside of the brain, supernatural phenomena, and such. That's totally wrong.

Scientists are devoted to learning the truth about ourselves, our world, and our universe. This newest detection of gravitational waves shows the lengths scientists will go to learn something important about reality.

Believe me, if there was substantial evidence in anything supernatural, scientists would be falling over themselves in the rush to study this phenomenon, since it would overturn longstanding assumptions about reality.

But religion never comes up with anything newsworthy about the nature of the cosmos. That's because religions deal in dogma, not facts. Which is why I'm a big fan of science, not of religion.

Comments

[um]

>>But religion never comes up with anything newsworthy about the nature of the cosmos. That's because religions deal in dogma, not facts<<

Maybe it has nothing to do with religion and science. and is it a matter of nature vs culture or even the function of the brain.

If a child is hungry, whatever the parents put before it, will be eaten with joy and leaves the child with satisfaction.

If there is no hunger, parents have to come up with ever new "tasty" things to make the child eat.

Water can be taking in without that it loses it appeal, as it is tasteless. Tasteless doesn't mean it has no taste, it has, but the taste it has cannot me described.

Adding taste will create the necessity to endless change and whatever taste is added, none will deliver that satisfaction that is found in, quenching thirst.

Taste, is like everything else, an unique variation of the same.
Sameness is "horizontal ' and "vertical" contraction, uniqueness variations are spreading horizontal and vertical into the endless emptiness

There has been no end to the desire for ever new explanations, presentation of the same mystical teachings ... the same holds for so called "laws of nature" The same all compassing law that governs the existence of nature, is time an again, artificial split intio unique variations of that same one law..

Some are fond of that sameness and other love the 10.000 things that are born from it.

[Appreciative Reader]

"This discovery shows why I love science so much."

Haha, I so so SO empathize with that sentiment!

This news story had caught my eye as well. And that is exactly what my reaction was when I read it: first, obviously, the wonder of the discovery itself, and everything that implies; and equally, the wonder of us puny humans, the merest ants crawling around on the surface of this immensity, being able to probe so deeply into the nature of reality; and all of that leading to a complete total appreciation of the wonder that is science.

[Spence Tepper]

This is a remarkable achievement. The symphony of teamwork of scientists over decades who have come to agreement on key principles, and their painstaking work to see, to review, to analyze, to interpret, even to understand each other's take. They worked for years, and many of the scientists working over these decades did not live to see these results. Certainly Einstein isn't here today to read the research article linked above. That greater outcome was not required for their painstaking effort and dedication, faith and discipline. These scientists weren't working to confirm. That was beyond those who died before the completion and publication of the study. They were working to learn, and as they learned, they contributed their data for others to finalize.

But the human miracle of science and how it is conducted is no more amazing than the reality behind it.

Yes, it helps verify an existing theory. But what of the new theories to come? Science can't simply verify the past conjectures and theories without bumping into a few anomalies that will require entirely new thinking, just as these current findings verify the new thinking of the past. The history of Science is the strongest possible evidence that what we don't know today, we may tomorrow, and we will be astonished.

There are two things to understand about these results:

1. Gravity is not a detectable energy or particle. It can only be detected by its effect on other sources of energy and matter. Like emptiness, gravity can only be measured by the other things within it and how they are affected.

The vast distances between celestial bodies have no detectable intermediary to explain how one body pulls upon the other. But the fact can be readily seen and measured, that these bodies are connected.

2. The mechanisms of measurement, of the effect of Gravity on other things, come from three sources:
A. the movement of celestial bodies themselves, their orbits, speed, distances from one another and mass.
B. the effect of gravity's pull upon all detectable matter and energy moving through the galaxy, such as the frequency and amplitude of pulsars, light waves, electromagnetic fields. When two forces affect one another, you get waves of interaction. When the crest of a wave moves from one object to another you can note the effect on one then another by measuring the time delay between the two. Gravity waves can be detected and measured as they move across the galaxy.
C., The effect of gravity's pull upon all matter right here on earth. Detecting those waves across two beams of energy, two lasers (LIGO), also generates another source of evidence as well that doesn't require any celestial data. This is evidence that gravity pulls from very distant sources, and moves at a pace that can be measured, in waves of interaction with all sources of matter and energy. And the direction and pace can be mathematically modeled back to its source.

Spirituality has a similar corollary. It may appear on the surface entirely empty. It can't be measured directly as a specific object or energy. It has no corporeal existence that can be isolated from everything else.

Spirituality can only be detected subtly by its affect upon us, and our perceptions. And that effect appears to be universal, it goes through all matter and energy. You can see its pull on others even when they aren't aware, and in retrospect, its pull on us, even when we weren't looking and weren't aware.

Spiritual adherents, serious about their practice, follow a few similar disciplines to dedicated scientists in that they avoid making conclusive statements, but work to deepen their detection and understanding of the spiritual experience within themselves.They note carefully the results of their practice, and how that practice is influenced. And they care not that they may work their entire lives without a firm conclusion that can be proven to anyone else. They have something there, and they may have a theory about it, but they are there to learn, not confirm.

[SantMat64]

Yes, this info about pulsars will make life so much better for all of us. (?)

What else have scientists given us lately to make the world a better place?
1) Vaccines that have no proven efficacy and are causing young people catastrophic health problems.
2) Grossly alarmist public health prescriptions for that virus that caused huge damage to young people and the world economy. Fauciism.
3) Grossly alarmist climate predictions going back several decades, none of which came true, the latest costing trillions of dollars to be wasted.
4) The opinion that children can choose their own "genders" and delay puberty with drugs, and chop off parts of their body.
5) The pharma industry in general, and the view that drugs will be our salvation.
6) The food industry in general, which has "scientific proof" that carbs are good for us. Meanwhile, one in 5 adults is obese and on the road to type 2 diabetes. You know, the disease that Gurinder Singh the lifelong vegetarian has.

There's no doubt that scientists have saved more lives anyone else. I just offer all of the above as a counterpoint to the idea that science will save us. This "science will save us" and is all we need idea has been around for a very long time. But in a corollary to the proverb, man does not live on science alone.

What are we supposed to do with this info on pulsars? I suppose we can read about it and feel exultation, but the same is true in reading Sar Bachan. For some people anyway.

But science didn't have anything to do with the remaking of the barren wasteland where now the RSSB dera stands, a religious center that feeds and gives medical support to thousands of people daily. That is, the motive for the dera's existence was and is "religious people." The needs of the people served by the dera aren't served by "look at this info on pulsars!"

Our needs are often not served by science. Often, science, or what's offered as "scientific truth," can be quite counterproductive to actual human progress.

I suppose the author of this piece had good intentions, but I wonder if he realizes that his theme is always the tearing down of institutions, ideas, beliefs. There's never any attempt to strike a balance, or give a balanced assessment of the place of religion in this world. Every essay he writes is a Jacobin screed that strawmans all religious believers as public enemies.

I mean, seriously, are religious believers actually "anti science"? Are they holding protests to demand that universities shut down their astronomy departments? Are they burning books that offer info on pulsars?

We're told that the great thing about science is that it's wonderfully self-correcting. Wonderfully honest about admitting its mistakes as it labors ever onward toward truth. Yes, this is true, but it's not absolutely true. Scientists today are bound by an unprecedented orthodoxy, and are quite as much beholden to money as is any other industry.

For that reason, it's as much a mistake to venerate a scientist as it is to venerate a guru. Both are quite fallible. Both can be more influenced by ego and ideology than they would ever care to admit, and loath to ever admit they're wrong -- or even deign to debate with their critics. So says Hotez.

So too our social scientists, who are often quite as faithful to their beloved thesis, and would sooner jump off a cliff than admit error. For years they talk of a politicians collusion with a foreign government, and when that's proven a hoax they're silent. They talk of a guru's obvious guilt in a financial scheme, and when that DeraGate fell apart, they likewise remain silent. So they delve into dark conspiracy theories about the guru murdering his wife and threatening his critics with death. Somehow, they're the only media outlet publishing such stuff, which to me either can mean they're as groundbreakingly sage as the National Enquirer in being first to tell us that Bruce had breasts, or they've gone Alex Jones on us.

But perhaps in the fullness of time they're be proven right about the guru. What a day that will be. Malvinder will be fully Malvindicated, Gurinder will be sent to prison for suborning embezzlement and murder. Perhaps the evidence will come from the shell companies.

Speaking of shell companies, I wonder who made more of them. The Dhillons or the Bidens?

Oh yea, may the truth be out.

[Spence Tepper]

Now scientists can objectively prove what Shakespeare wrote, and every mystic enjoys hearing, that the stars sing and there is music in each of us and all things.

"Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it."

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

[Cassiodorus]

There’s quite a bit of research that shows that’s it’s not a coincidence that modern science arose in the West and not elsewhere- the crucial distinctive ingredient being Christianity .

[Spence Tepper]

Hi Cassiodorous

You wrote
"There’s quite a bit of research that shows that’s it’s not a coincidence that modern science arose in the West and not elsewhere- the crucial distinctive ingredient being Christianity ."

Modern science, if you mean today's science, happens internationally from all cultures. Where did it actually arise?

It is really a matter of what one is reading, the stories one reads in history books.

Today, with the availability of the internet, one can find the scientific contributions from all cultures around the world throughout recorded history.

"As well as giving us the concept of zero, Indian mathematicians made seminal contributions to the study of trigonometry, algebra, arithmetic and negative numbers among other areas. Perhaps most significantly, the decimal system that we still employ worldwide today was first seen in India. "

https://theconversation.com/five-ways-ancient-india-changed-the-world-with-maths-84332#:~:text=As%20well%20as%20giving%20us,was%20first%20seen%20in%20India.

Without zero there would be no ratio scale, no measurement, no statistics, no probability, which are the foundational tools of all modern scientific research.

Newton could not have invented Calculus without the Italian Fibbonaci's Liber Abaci. And Fibbonaci could not have developed his understanding of numbers without the concept of Zero, quadratic equations and the square root, first explained in the seventh center AD by Hindu astronomer and mathematician Brahmagupta...

[Cassiodorus]

Hey Spencer ,

Sure , all civilizations have done science . Absolutely . But my comment was aimed at pushing back on the notion that religion ( at least the Christian religion) is somehow contrary to scientific inquiry . The greatest advancements in scientific knowledge emerged from the intellectual - spiritual matrix of western Christendom. And as I alluded to , that’s not a coincidence .