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New Distributed Project Seeks Gravity Waves

Posted by timothy on Sat Feb 19, 2005 04:19 PM
from the jeff-spicolli-knows-where-they're-at dept.
The Internet Science
fenimor writes "Much like the popular SETI@Home distributed computing project that searches radio telescope data for signs of extraterrestrial life, the new Einstein@Home will search for gravitational waves in data collected by U.S. and European gravitational wave detectors. Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916, but only now has technology reached the point that scientists hope to detect them directly."
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  • What do gravity waves tell us? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 19 2005, @04:20PM (#11724424)
    What do gravity waves tell us that EM radiation doesn't? Will these measurements allow us to image distant objects that are otherwise invisible?

    • Re:What do gravity waves tell us? (Score:5, Informative)

      by turnstyle (588788) on Saturday February 19 2005, @04:26PM (#11724451) Homepage
      "What do gravity waves tell us that EM radiation doesn't?"

      It would be another confirmation of Einstein's theory. Some more background here [wikipedia.org].

      And here's some about a recent satellite [wikipedia.org] also hoping to establish the existence of gravity waves.

      • Sorry, gravity probe B (the recent satellite) is not trying to confirm the existence of gravity waves. GPB is looking for "frame dragging," another predicted effect of general relativity. Gyroscopes in GPB should precess, despite the fact that they are over the poles of the earth and (to first order, excluding motion about the sun and the motion of our solar system itself) not in a rotating frame. Even though the gyroscopes won't be in a rotating frame, their spacetime metric will be 'dragged' by the rotating massive earth, causing a precession of some parts of arcseconds (check the web page for more).
      • Something about using Wikipedia as a definitive reference for anything leaves me underwhelmed.

        And, yes, go ahead and mark me Troll

        • Re:This. (Score:3, Informative)

          by LionMan (18384)
          1) Any theory in contention with either of these would probably only be an alternative to one or the other, considering that GR and QM make predictions on completely different scales and are generally not unified.
          2) GR does not make any prediction such as "in the far field, gravity waves should look like the result of dipole excitations" or quadrupole. In the far field, in a linearized patch of spacetime (a small patch of it, in which special relativity can be applied) gravity waves should obey a linear wav

    • Re:What do gravity waves tell us? (Score:5, Informative)

      by cot (87677) on Saturday February 19 2005, @04:31PM (#11724473)
      If you detect gravity waves from sources like supernovae, black hole collisions, etc. you're confirming that Einstein's GR works and that the properties of the waves (ie amplitude, duration) make sense for that particular source.

      If you can detect primordial gravity waves from the very early universe(harder!), you now have an indication that inflation (rapid expansion) of the universe is a reasonable cosmological model rather than its current somewhat ad hoc status. It nicely explains away some problems with simpler models, but no real direct test has been performed to show that it happened.

    • Re:What do gravity waves tell us? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by StupendousMan (69768) on Saturday February 19 2005, @04:40PM (#11724529) Homepage

      First, the direct detection of gravitational waves would confirm certain aspects of the theory of general relativity, as other posters have noted.

      Second, gravitational wave detectors will provide us with a new window to the universe. Ordinary stars emit mostly visible light, so ordinary optical telescopes are well suited to their study. Cold clouds of interstellar gas emit mostly radio waves, so radio telescopes are the best choice to study them. We know of certain objects --- relatively uncommon ones -- which ought to produce a good deal of gravitational radiation: very massive objects moving very quickly, such as pairs of black holes or neutron stars orbiting around each other at small distances. Gravitational wave detectors will allow astronomers to study the properties of these objects more precisely than we can with ordinary telescopes (since they do not emit much electromagnetic radiation).

      Finally, it is possible (though I suspect unlikely) that the universe may contain a whole class (or classes) of objects which are currently unknown to us, but which will appear as strong sources of gravitational radiation. Almost every time astronomers have added a new type of telescope to their toolkit, they have stumbled across previously unknown phenomena. The first gamma-ray telescopes, for example, revealed gamma-ray bursts, which were completely undetected (and unexpected) by other means in the late sixties and early seventies.

      One last note: LIGO and other gravitational wave detectors provide very poor angular resolution, compared to ordinary optical telescopes. They will tell us something like "a source of gravitational waves is over there, about 10 degrees above the horizon at 5 degrees south of East." The "error circle" for a typical detection will be a few degrees in size. It may be quite a challenge for astronomers to identify the optical counterpart to a new source of gravitational waves, since there will usually be thousands to millions of optical sources within the error box of a gravitational wave detection.

      • Actually, the angular resolution is worse than that. The antenna pattern of the LIGO and VIRGO projects is close to 90 degrees of sky. However, work is under way at Caltech to use multiple detectors (like LIGO Hanford and Livingston) in a fashion similar to how radio astronomy uses multiple dishes to form a more sensitive, finer resolution antenna (this is based on interferometery).
        The stochastic gravity wave background, which is a prediction of inflation, is predicted to be at power levels which are curren
    • You also have to keep in mind that for something about which we know so little, learning more about it will probably lead to applications we haven't even thought of yet. When X-rays were discovered, do you think Roentgen immediately thought of using it for detecting weapons in bags or measuring atomic spacing in crystal latices? Probably not. It could very well be useless, but I expect we will find something useful to do with them if and when we detect them (assuming they exist).
    • Gravitational Radiation being much weaker, thus harder to detect, does not interact with matter like the electromagnetic radiation does. As a result, gravitational waves produced by spiraling binary star systems, coalescing stars, supermassive black holes etc will be unaltered when detected giving us a completely new perspective in how we look to the universe. It will be like the transition from optical telescopes to x-ray ones.

      An excellent, popular book about the topic is Black Holes and Time Wraps by Kip

  • Bah humbug. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dauthur (828910) <tossage@gmail.com> on Saturday February 19 2005, @04:24PM (#11724436)
    Even though it's one of the most popular philisophical astronomy books ever, A Brief History Of Time (Stephen Hawking) really happened to open up my eyes, and I sought extra reading. After all this time, even beforeward, I knew about gravitational waves considering the 4th dimension. The thought of actual waves though seems hard to imagine, considering gravity comes from mass, not anything non-particle. The idea that a massive supernova could propel gravitational waves at us in such a way as it does micro gamma and cosmic waves sounds absolutely rediculous unless, of course, the actual mass encounters us too (That would take a while).

  • Relevant link (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 19 2005, @04:26PM (#11724450)
    http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/ [uwm.edu]

    Posting as AC to avoid karma whoring.
      • It's a holdover. People used to post relevant but obvious information in an attempt to get their karma number as high as possible.

        Stuff like how Einstein@ home is running on BOINC, which also runs SETI@home
        http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
        so it should be pretty stable. Anyone who read the articles or attempted to sign up would know that, but most of the mods didn't do either.

        They were playing the Karma game, back when karma was permanently accrued and displayed. People got their Karma numbers up into the tens
  • Can this project lead to an anti-gravity engine? Obviously, the first engine will not be powerful enough for a spaceship to escape the gravity of earth, but maybe it will lead to maglev cars that don't require special tracks like the train.
    • Dude! Star Trek! Not real!! Data!
    • WHAT? RTFA, because you're way off track.

      • How the heck is parent a troll? Gee, get your mods right...

        There's a lot of moderators out there that don't understand just what a Troll is. They think that if they don't agree with somebody's opinions, that makes the poster a Troll, no matter how polite and well-reasoned teh post is. Either that, or they think it's a good way to punish somebody they don't like. All I know is, at least half the Troll mods I get to meta-mod are unfair, and that's how I mark them.

  • Not to push this down, but isn't Folding@Home [stanford.edu] a little more important for humanity overall?
    • Why? What's the point of living if we can't poke our nose into space and ask fundamental questions?
      • Because Gravity Waves are going to be a proof of Einstein's theories - which, correct me if I'm wrong, have been mostly proven anyways. Personally, I think the way the human body works, with all it's quirks and complexities, is much more interesting than gravity waves and such. And more important, seeing how Folding@Home has the theoretical possibility of curing things like ALS, etc. You're allowed to ask all the questions you want, I'm just saying Folding is a much better way to spend your extra cpu cycle

    • Re:Not to push this down... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Dachannien (617929) on Saturday February 19 2005, @05:07PM (#11724685)
      By that logic, a significant portion of pure science wouldn't be considered worthwhile (most of astronomy, large portions of mathematics and physics, small portions of biology). And why should we even bother expending human resources on the arts, when there are lives to save?

    • Re:Not to push this down... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TheGavster (774657) on Saturday February 19 2005, @05:22PM (#11724772) Homepage
      Some people want to live forever, some people just want to understand the universe. Its really a matter of personal preference.

  • Kind of worries me. (Score:3, Funny)

    by SushiFugu (593444) on Saturday February 19 2005, @04:45PM (#11724557)
    The $randomwisdom at the bottom of slashdot currently reads "When things go well, expect something to explode, erode, collapse or just disappear." I sort of deep down hope they don't find them now.
  • I read in some books, that gravitational waves were observed in the 70s years in one of the first built detectors. The source of the waves was the centre of our galaxy.
    Unfortunately the experiment was not confirmed in a latter one, and it is believed, that something else was observed in this moment.
    Did someone knows something else about this first experiment?

  • LIGO project (Score:4, Informative)

    by karvind (833059) <karvind@NOspam.gmail.com> on Saturday February 19 2005, @05:00PM (#11724640) Journal
    Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory [caltech.edu] from Caltech is working on same subject. LIGO will search for gravitational waves created in supernova collapses of stellar cores (which form neutron stars and black holes), collisions and coalescences of neutron stars or black holes, rotations of neutron stars with deformed crusts and the remnants of gravitational radiation created by the birth of the universe. LIGO is a joint project between scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

  • The coolest thing about this project is: (Score:3, Informative)

    by ArcCoyote (634356) on Saturday February 19 2005, @05:06PM (#11724677)
    The kickass OpenGL screensaver it gives you!

    The BOINC [berkeley.edu] versions of Seti@Home and Climateprediction are similar.
    You can attach to all of them and have the client devide your CPU time any way you want.
    BOINC also has a folding client (predictor@home), but there's no eye candy.
  • Why are so many people participating in seti@home when both the goal and the expected result are kind of weak? It seems that an ideologic goal seems to attractive power of an ideologic goal is higher than the repelling power of a low chance of success. I would rate this as a goal irrelevant to most people and an undefined chance of success, so why join? In my opinion, biology projects with protein folding to find cancer/AIDS cures seem to have the best chance of success/utility product.
  • And that's where you'll fiind what SETI is looking for. Radio is a thing of the distant past for civilizations who have lived long enough to learn how to not kill each other off. Gravity waves are not blocked or obscured by anything, and the only source of emissions at GHz frequencies are alien-made.

  • They Claim To "Own" The Data (Score:5, Insightful)

    by John Hasler (414242) on Saturday February 19 2005, @05:42PM (#11724927)
    No thanks. I don't donate to people who claim to own data.

    They also make no mention of license terms or client source availability.
    • The only reason the claim to ownership is there is so that if your machine is the one that analyzes the parcel of data that reveals Gravity Waves, you can't take credit away from the Project by claiming that you discovered it. Also, that would probably make it illegal to alter the data, which would render the @home process illegal. The same goes for client source code, if the programs were modify so that the data was analyzed differently than everyone else's, it would be useless to compare to the others.

  • Gravity waves != Gravitational waves (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TMB (70166) on Saturday February 19 2005, @06:19PM (#11725103)
    The blurb correctly says that they are looking for gravitational waves. The title incorrectly calls these gravity waves.

    Gravity waves are waves where displacement from equilibrium in a medium is counteracted by the force of gravity. For example, the waves on the surface of a pond are due to regions that are higher getting pulled down by gravity.

    Gravitational waves are a phenomenon in general relativity where accelerating dense masses cause waves in the space-time metric that propogate at the speed of light.

    [TMB]

  • project MiniGrail (Score:3, Informative)

    by rjdegraaf (712353) on Saturday February 19 2005, @06:28PM (#11725165)
    At Leiden University in The Netherlands a project called MiniGrail [minigrail.nl] tries to detect gravitational wave produced by neutron stars.

  • "Grassroots project" my ass (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 19 2005, @07:00PM (#11725352)
    This pisses me off. I saw Kip Thorne lecture on LIGO project. They are spending lots of $, a few billion, on detectors, but they presumptuously PRESUME they will be able to use the free cycles of a distributed project to wade through their "data". (The gravity wave detectors are supremely sensitive motion detectors, and the gravity waves they hope to detect are expected to cause motion fluctuations MANY TIMES SMALLER THAN A SINGLE NEUCLEUS. On top of this "signal" with be noise of all vibrations around, cars on the street, slamming doors. etc. From the data they hope to extract signal by analysing and canceling noise; this is what the distributed project is supposed to do.) What pisses me off is they aren't budgeting for their own computer resources, they are leeching off the donation-net. Which takes away from other projects that really have no budget , and/or really are more important, and/or more likely to have a positive outcome. Example: SETI at home is low budget, they are piggybacking data acquisition from device built for other purpose (Aricebo), so the donations make sense; they allow something to happen that otherwise not. Folding@home, actually could help health. Mersenne primes, brute-forcing ciphers, a nice hobby, kinda boring and pointless to me, but no budget; each to his/her own. BUT LIGO is BIG SCIENCE, ($billions) yet they don't budget their own computational needs. In a way it's fraudulent to set up experiment on that basis; without the computations, you don't have an experiment, yet you ASSUME people will give you computer time, BUT that computer time is being drawn from a finite pool of well-wishing volunteers, and thus causing a loss to those other projects who really have to budget.

    Thanks for giving me this opportunity to vent.

    Slashdot, please make your text entry box a little wider.

  • Mac OS X client not ready for prime time (Score:3, Informative)

    by steve_bryan (2671) on Saturday February 19 2005, @09:05PM (#11726070)
    They should have written an actual Mac OS X application before advertising their project to the public. Even within the constraints of users who don't mind using the Terminal for manipulating and launching processes it is inadequate. In the terminal the first thing it did after using chmod +x to make it executable was come back and request the URL for the project. Say what? There is nothing in the documentation that I could find indicating something like this would be asked. Then after proceeding a bit further it indicated it could not find the choices I had made to the parameters it uses to govern how it will run so it set them to defaults!

    I'm supposed to trust these amateurs with my Mac? If they don't have the needed programming knowledge they need to get it and do so before inflicting unnecessary havoc on unsuspecting voluteers. Take a look at Folding@Home or SETI to get an idea of what you need to have done before you ask the public to trust your work.

    • Re:ARGH (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I used to run seti@home 24/7 until i realized that half of my electricity bill was from keeping my computers on all the time. I still run it when i'm using my computer (like right now) but turn off the comp when i go to bed and when i'm at work.
      • If you've got the room in your house and the money for supercooled kiloton Aluminum bars,

        No need for that, just invite CowboyNeal and show him the USB device.
    • There's some online info somewhere on the LIGO project about the things they're looking for. One hoped-for event is two black holes in close orbit (generating a gravitational wave with frequency determined by their orbital times) which get closer and fall into each other, generating a higher and higher frequency as they close in on each other.

      Also, read yesterday's story "Science: Huge Star Quake Rocks Milky Way" http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/ 1 9/013255&tid=160 [slashdot.org] - I imagine that even

    • Re:Serious question. (Score:4, Informative)

      by jpflip (670957) on Saturday February 19 2005, @05:17PM (#11724745)
      Detecting gravitational waves isn't the same as detecting the pull of gravity (that we've been doing for a long time). There is an analogy to electromagnetism - the attractive or repulsive force between electric charges is like gravity's pull, but light (electromagnetic waves) are analogous to gravity waves. General relativity predicts that accelerating mass can generate ripples in spacetime (gravity waves) that can carry away energy. There's a good bit of evidence that says the ripples are there (for instance, binary pulsars seem to spiral toward one another at just the rate that would be explained by the loss of energy to gravity waves), but the waves themselves have never been detected. Detecting gravity waves would be an excellent test of general relativity, for one. It could also give us new ways of looking at events in the cosmos, similar to the way in which radio astronomy revolutionized the study of the universe.
    • Is this a script? If so, you guys need to work on grammar more than relevance. An irrelevant comment usually gets more replies than a grammatically incorrect one.
    • This is cool and all, but I think Folding@home is more relevant and important. It's an amazing perversity that we know less about how the components of our bodies work than about how stars and black holes work.

      There are probably some simple reasons for that. Stars and black holes are simpler and easier to learn about than protiens.

      I do agree that biological research is important, OTOH I don't feel badly that more people don't choose to donate their extra CPU cycles to such research. I paid for my compute
    • Unfortunately, BECAUSE it's more relevant and important, I find myself less willing to be taken advantage of. These people end up in control of resources created in conjunction with public effort, and they end up in total control.

      It wouldn't bother me if what they ended up with was publication priority, but they stand to end up with patents that mean they can deny benefits to the very people who helped them. I find this undesireable.

      OTOH, Einsein@home and Seti@Home don't appear to have the commercial mo
    • That is very negative. Remember your superior attitude at the end, when the last thing you hear is: "Your' planet has been scheduled for demolition to make way for a galactic..." etc....

    • Re:Its a big question... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Almost-Retired (637760) on Saturday February 19 2005, @07:40PM (#11725603)
      this einstein-project is IMHO a little bit more worth to support than SETI, but those cancer-project is the one everybody should support (sorry, got no url right now)

      I have been doing seti for nearly since it started, currently standing at 99.339% in overall rankings.

      I do this mainly because my sci-fi reading goes all the way back to E.E. (Doc) Smith, which some of you might consider as the McGuffies Readers of the day and which is circa 60+ years back up the log now. One always hopes that his machine might be the one to raise its hand and holler, Hey Teach, I hear something.

      But realisticly, after 5+ years, and the results of nearly 6 million people, coupled with the limited sky view of Aricebo, does tend to tell you after a while that the chances are someplace between point double ought zip and absolutely nothing. The data, I think, has been analysed several times by now, with no really outstanding candidate signals haveing been detected. Going over that same limited band of the sky, at the same limited band of frequencies, is beginning to grow old.

      This gravity wave project is intrigueing, but I don't seem to be able to dl the BOINC client, mime type error I think at the BOINC site.

      As far as the parent posters suggestion that we should be working on the cancer project, sorry but I'm enough of an open source advocate that my cycles will not be used for such a project wherein the output data is owned by some commercial entity, who if they get lucky will profit immensely from any discoveries so made. Likewise for the folding@home project. If the results are not to be public knowledge, able to benefit all manner of life, then screw 'em just like they'll screw me at the prescription counter for the product that may result.

      There is, I would hope, a new way of doing such research that will meet these ideas, doing it openly, with the results being unencumbered by patents, and the products so developed then sold on the open market (but regulated by the FDA of course) by the time honored tradition of he who can do it the best, or cheapest, being the marketplace winner, with open competition between the makers for our dollars. The FDA's job then is like the agriculture dept folks, to make sure the process is being done by the proper methods, that being by way of testing the efficiency, and safety of the product at doing what it is being sold for.

      But to bring that about, you are all I trust, aware that we will have to declare a Bill Shakespear day as an annual holiday.

      The chances of that actually happening are also somewhere between point double ought zip and nothing in our present society.

      Then, and only then, would I personally be interested in doing what amounts to free data processing for a commercially profitable entity.

      Now, if they want to buy my cpu time at a rate that helps me pay the energy bill to run these machines, and a piece of the action (no RIAA bookkeeping to be allowed here folks, its a piece of the gross sales only, the internal expenses for that Lamborgini and the sexytary who wants a quarter of a mill just to have your baby are yours to control) then I might consider learning a different tune.

      But I sure wouldn't sleep any better.

      Now, if they would fix the mime type on the linux binary of BOINC, I'd dl it and take a look.

      Cheers, Gene
      • From the Folding@home FAQ
        http://folding.stanford.edu/faq.html#project.own [stanford.edu]

        Who "owns" the results? What will happen to them?
        Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it. Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the

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