Of course, humans are too small to sense all but the strongest gravitational waves, so imagine you were a great creature of deep space, with tendrils that could extend a million kilometers. As gravitational waves rippled across your vast body, you would sense them squeezing and tugging ever so slightly upon you. And your brilliant mind could use these sensations to create an image in your mind.
Perhaps there is such a creature in the vastness of space, but we humans must rely upon our intelligence and engineering. And we may achieve such a vision of the cosmos through a gravitational wave observatory such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA. Similar to LIGO, LISA will detect gravitational waves by bouncing laser light along extended arms, measuring the minuscule variations in arms length. But while LIGO has arms just 4 kilometers long, LISA could have arms millions of kilometers long.
The team looked at various known gravitational wave sources such as binary white dwarf, neutron stars, and merging black holes, and calculated the frequencies and magnitudes of their gravitational waves. They then filtered these sources through the estimated limits of what LISA and a second proposed telescope the Advanced MilliHertz Gravitational-wave Observatory should detect. From this, they assigned colors to various frequency ranges to create a false-color image of the sky.
We’re still a decade or more away from the launch of LISA, so it will be a while before we can see the real image of the gravitational sky. But that image is out there right now. It ripples through all of us and has every day of our lives. If we’re patient and clever, it’s only a matter of time until we finally see those waves upon our cosmic shore.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: Gizmodo - 🏆 556. / 51 Read more »
Source: IntEngineering - 🏆 287. / 63 Read more »
Source: screenrant - 🏆 7. / 94 Read more »
Source: screenrant - 🏆 7. / 94 Read more »
Source: screenrant - 🏆 7. / 94 Read more »
Source: screenrant - 🏆 7. / 94 Read more »