First Observation of a Neutron Star with Gravitational Waves and Light!

THE OBSERVATIONS

At about 8:41 am EDT on 17 August 2017, both LIGO observatories recorded a 100-second long gravitational wave (GW) signal that appeared to be coming from two neutron stars orbiting each other and merging together (this detection is called GW170817).  1.7 seconds later, the Fermi Gamma Ray Burst Monitor detected a short gamma-ray burst (GRB).  LIGO's online data analysis, along with Virgo not detecting the event due to its location in a part of the sky it isn't sensitive to, narrowed down the possible location of the gravitational wave source to the constellation Hydra (in the Southern Hemisphere) which overlapped with the area determined from the GRB detection.  Both the LIGO and GRB detectors put out circulars alerting the astronomy community to the independent discoveries; an event like this was unprecedented and became a priority target for observation.  LIGO also produced a luminosity distance (a method of estimating the distance to the source) of about 130 million light-years.

11 hours after the gravitational wave and GRB detections (the delay was caused by the time it took for the Earth to rotate observatories in South America into their nighttime sky), the 1-m Swope Telescope in Chile observed a new point of light (referred to as a transient) from galaxy NGC 4993, also about 130 million light-years away!  Approximately 70 other observatories, both on our planet and orbiting it, observed this new source of light: 11.5 hours after GW/GRB detection, infrared light was observed; 15 hours later, ultraviolet light was observed; as the days went on, the optical light from the source became redder (longer wavelength) and dimmer than the early days; 9 days later, x-rays were observed; 16 days later, radio waves were observed.

CLICK TO ENLARGE!
Left: GRB data (top) collected by Fermi and gravitational wave data (bottom) collected by LIGO.
Right: Source localization on the sky from the INTEGRAL GRB satillite (light blue band), Fermi (the dark blue disk), LIGO alone (green ovals), and LIGO and VIRGO data combined (dark green oval).  Notice that all sources identified the LIGO-Virgo area.  A new source of light (located at the intersection of the tic marks) was identified inside the overlapping area by the Swope telecope (top image inset). The image below the inset is of the same area but 20.5 days before this event showing that this source was not present. [Credit: LIGO, Virgo, Fermi, Swope, DLT40]

TURNING OBSERVATIONS INTO MEANING

The cause(s) of short GRBs have been the subject of much theoretical research; the predominant theory is that they are caused by the merger of two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole.  The problem is that light isn't capable of bringing us information about these kinds of systems.  So, we've seen many short GRBs, we have ideas about how they are made based on these observations, and have been waiting for evidence to either support or refute the theory.  Fortunately, gravitational waves bring us the information about the system that light can't, like the masses of the objects and how they moved around each other.  This is the first conclusive evidence that at least some of the short GRBs are created by neutron star mergers.

This visualization shows the coalescence of two orbiting neutron stars. The left panel contains a visualization of the matter of the neutron stars. The different colored layers are different densities, which have been made transparent to show more structure. The right panel shows how space-time is distorted near the collisions. The spiral wave distortions at the end of the merger propagate to Earth and are measured as gravitational waves. [Credit: (taken from ligo.org) Christopher W. Evans/Georgia Tech]

Light observations allowed us to observe the rapid fading of the brightness and gradual lengthening of the wavelength (reddening) of the light which is a signature of a kilonova explosion.  Kilonovae are also thought to be the source of most of the heavy elements in the universe.  (I have previouslyattributed these to supernova here; further research has shown that while a supernova can make some heavy elements, it can't make enough of the heavier ones like gold to account for the amounts we have.)  Breaking the light down into its different wavelengths (colors) tells us about the composition of the source or of elements being created.  Measurements like this showed that heavy elements were indeed created as predicted in this kilonova and supports that neutron star mergers may very well be the source of most of the heavy elements in the universe.

Periodic table indicating the sources of the elements.  Orange indicates formation from the merger of neutron stars like the source of GW170817. [Credit: Jenifer Johnson]

The timing of the arrival of gravitational waves and the gamma-ray burst (1.7 seconds later) are our strongest support yet that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light.  Detecting gravitational waves first is not unexpected since this system has been producing gravitational waves its whole life and we only saw the last 100 seconds of it.  It is the dynamics of what happens during the merger that produces the light in the form of a GRB, so we should expect a delay.  Even when considering different possible ways and times for light to be made in a system like this, our observations are consistent with the prediction that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light.


WHAT DID THIS NEUTRON STAR MERGER CREATE?

A remaining question that the observations we've made hasn't been able to answer is: What did this neutron star merger create: a very large neutron star or a black hole?  We simply don't know and the reason why is that we don't have a firm understanding of the equation of state (EOS) for a neutron star (EOS is a technical term for describing matter and how it behaves).  Depending on different possible EOSs, we can get either a small black hole or a very massive neutron star at some time after the merger.  We also looked for gravitational wave evidence of which it is since a small black hole would have produced gravitational waves at about 6000 Hz and a very massive neutron star would produce them up to 4000 Hz.  The LIGO detectors are not very sensitive at high frequencies, making finding evidence for a resultant black hole impossible.  We did search for gravitational waves consistent with the formation of a very massive neutron star until the end of the run on 25 August (8 days later) and didn't find anything.  We found nothing to support either possibility so we simply don't know!

The masses of stellar remnants are measured in many different ways. This graphic shows the masses for black holes detected through electromagnetic observations (purple); the black holes measured by gravitational-wave observations (blue); neutron stars measured with electromagnetic observations (yellow); and the masses of the neutron stars that merged in an event called GW170817, which were detected in gravitational waves (orange). The remnant of GW170817 is unclassified, and labeled as a question mark. [Credit: LIGO-Virgo/Frank Elavsky/Northwestern University]

THIS IS JUST THE START!

This is the true beginning of multi-messenger astronomy!  As was referred to in this post, gravitational waves, light, and neutrinos (looked for during this event but none were found) bring us different information about the universe.  Gravitational waves tell us about how mass moves around and how much of it there is; light tells us about temperature, and composition; neutrinos can bring us information about the nuclear reactions happening deep within a star.  The effort to make and share all of these observations require not just scientific knowledge, but cooperation on a large scale.  There are many things that divide us in our societies; this is something we should be proud to unite us!

Artist’s illustration of two merging neutron stars. The rippling space-time grid represents gravitational waves that travel out from the collision, while the narrow beams show the bursts of gamma rays that are shot out just seconds after the gravitational waves. Swirling clouds of material ejected from the merging stars are also depicted. The clouds glow with visible and other wavelengths of light. [Credit: NSF/LIGO/Sonoma State University/A. Simonnet]

Second Anniversary of the First Detection and a New Job!

While posts here have been long awaited, I've been busy doing research, teaching, and changed my job!  I've just started a new job as an assistant professor at Villanova University and an academic job search is quite intensive (perhaps I will write about finding a faculty job soon).  Also, I've been writing some other things.  I've written a TED-Ed video/lesson on gravitational waves and it premiers today (you can view it here), I have a PhysicsWorld Discovery text on "Gravitational Waves" coming soon, and have written a few other things here and there.  So, now that I've moved from Baton Rouge to the suburbs of Philadelphia, I have some time to talk with all of you again.



ANNIVERSARY OF GW150914:  WHERE IS IT NOW?

Today is the second anniversary of the first detection of gravitational waves.  That got me thinking of about where the front of that wave is now...

The colored area on this map shows the most probable source of the detected gravitational wave where red is more likely than purple.  The location is shown against a map of the night sky centered on the Milky Way galaxy with constellations outlined.
[Credits: NASA Deep Star Maps (Visualization Credits, Ernie Wright (USRA): Lead Animator, Tom Bridgman (GST): Animator) by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio with constellation figures based on those developed for the IAU by Alan MacRobert of Sky and Telescope magazine (Roger Sinnott and Rick Fienberg), and the source location based on Gravoscope screen grabs (LIGO & Nick Risinger, skysurvey.org), all in galactic coordinates. Composition by University of Florida / S. Barke.]

The source of GW150914 was from the general vicinity of the constellations Volans and Carina.  That means that it is traveling towards the stars in the constellation Draco.  It hasn't encountered much.  Since it has traveled a distance of 2 light years from Earth, it is still in our Milky Way galaxy (the radius of the Milky Way 60,000 is ly and its disk is 2000 ly).  It has not encountered any other stars (the closest star in Draco is Struve 2398, a binary system of red dwarf stars 11.6 ly away) and therefore no other planets.  That means that no other life forms have detected GW150914 and won't reach Struve until early 2027 (give or take for the error in our understanding of its distance).


THE THIRD DETECTION: GW170104

Since I wrote last, we announced the discovery of a third detection of gravitational waves from another binary black hole system dubbed GW170104.  A black hole 32 times the mass of our Sun merged with another black hole 19 times the mass of our Sun resulting in a single 49 solar mass black hole after radiating away 3 solar masses in gravitational waves.  Among other things, this detection helps to fill in the range of masses we've observed; gaps would imply that there is something preventing the formation of those kinds of systems and that would be unexpected.

Graphic representation of the known stellar mass black holes observed through X-ray observations (purple) and gravitational waves (blue).  [credit: LIGO/Caltech/MIT/Sonoma State (Aurore Simonnet)]

TESTING GENERAL RELATIVITY 

This system originated from about 3 billion light-years away: farther out in the universe than any of our previous detections.  Using a gravitational wave that has traveled such a distance allows us to test a part of general relativity that we haven't been able to before: do gravitational waves disperse?  For example, when white light enters a prism, the different colors (frequencies) of light travel at slightly different speeds causing them to separate or disperse.  General relativity predicts that different frequencies of gravitational waves should not disperse.  There are alternate theories of gravity that make predictions of how dispersion will affect a gravitational wave.  We compared our observation to standard general relativity and the alternate theories' predictions and found our observations to be consistent with general relativity.  That is, we did not observe any significant dispersion of our gravitational wave!  We've also done all of the tests of general relativity that were done for the previous detections and this gravitational wave continues to affirm that general relativity is correct.

MEASURING SPIN TO INVESTIGATE BLACK HOLE FORMATION

Artist's conception shows two merging black holes similar to those detected by LIGO. The black holes are spinning in a non-aligned fashion, which means they have different orientations relative to the overall orbital motion of the pair. LIGO found hints that at least one black hole in the system called GW170104 was non-aligned with its orbital motion before it merged with its partner. Credit: LIGO/Caltech/MIT/Sonoma State (Aurore Simonnet)

We also were able to investigate the spin of the black holes.  For as mind-blowing as a black hole is, it is completely described by three numbers: 1) its mass, 2) its spin, 3) its charge (this is postulated by the no-hair theorem).  Since we believe the electric charge of astrophysical black holes to be negligible, physicists get very excited about the mass and the spin.  The mass is not too hard to measure (we can get that pretty accurately from the waveform shape and frequency evolution), but the spin is all in the details of the signal which makes it more difficult to estimate.  But we always still mention it because any information we get about it will tell us more about the other half of the back hole's story.

For this detection, we were able to extract information about how the combined spin of the black hole system compares to the direction of its orbital angular momentum.  Basically, does the direction the effective spin of the black holes (on their internal axes) go in the same direction as their orbit?  For example, the Earth spins on its axis in the same direction as it orbits the Sun, so this is a positive alignment, but the Earth's axis is tilted so it isn't a perfect alignment.

If most of our black hole systems have small misalignments that would support their formation through something we call "common envelope evolution" (I wrote about this here), which is a complicated way of saying that the stars that formed the black holes were always paired together and once they both died you end up with a binary black hole system.  The interactions between those original stars will cause their spins to align giving the resulting binary black hole system only small misalignments.

Another formation mechanism for binary black holes is that they just happened to pass one another while drifting through space and became gravitationally bound together (this is called dynamical assembly).  We expect things like this to happen in dense stellar clusters or near the centers of galaxies.  Since these would have had no interaction with each other before they became a system, we expect random spin alignments from the black holes.

Ultimately we found that our system likely had a low total spin and was likely not aligned with the orbital angular momentum of the system.  It is also possible that our black holes had no spin to begin with.  So this isn't definitive, but we are starting to assemble the story of how black hole systems like this form.


THE BIG PICTURE

With this discovery, we are adding to our understanding of the universe and testing general relativity in ways we've never been able to before.  The importance is that LIGO is truly operating as an observatory (that's what the 'O' in LIGO stands for after all) and building a database of observations.  In astronomy, you can never make a single observation and understand a system's history.  You need to take a large sample of observations from similar systems and find out what the patterns are.  That's how we understand how stars evolve since a human life, or even all of human existence, isn't long enough to have followed a single star's life cycle.  But because we have observed many stars in different stages of their lives we've discovered patterns.  That's how we know that the black holes we just observed are the collapsed corpses of the extremely massive stars.  Now we can collect observations of many of these black hole systems to learn more about black holes in general and how these pairs of black holes form.

Merry Christmas, LIGO: Another Gravitational Wave!

WE DETECTED ANOTHER GRAVITATIONAL WAVE!

On the evening of Christmas day 2015, at 9:38 pm CST (3:38 am UTC) at the LIGO Livingston Observatory in Louisiana, another gravitational wave signal was recorded.  1.1 ms later, the LIGO Hanford Observatory in Washington state also picked up the same signal.  70 seconds later, the supercomputer that runs analyses on the near real-time data noticed that there was something special in the data and sent out emails and text messages that some of us affectionately call the "Bat Signal".  This goes out to scientists primarily to summon those who evaluate candidate gravitational wave events to determine if this event should be shared with traditional astronomers (i.e. ones with telescopes).  I am on the list because I am interested in keeping up on the latest results.  I remember exactly where I was: I was in my room at my mother's house outside of Pittsburgh changing clothes after getting back from visiting the in-laws (who live within a few miles of my family's home) for Christmas.  I looked at the event record and saw that this was an extraordinary candidate gravitational wave in that its statistical significance was high but the signal wasn't as obvious in graphs as the first detection in September was.

It was decided to send out the location of the possible detection to traditional astronomers and the emails started flying discussing the evidence that this was a true detection.  It was determined that the preliminary information on the signal warranted starting the detection checklist - the large-scale investigations that try to disprove that the signal is real.  Only after a candidate passes every test and has a high statistical significance is it accepted as a detection.  The same checklist that was applied to the first detection, labeled GW150914, was applied to this candidate as well.  Once this Christmas detection was verified, it was labeled GW151226 (the number reflects the UTC date that the gravitational wave was discovered) although we had nicknamed it the "Boxing Day Event" before the verification.

(Below I will often refer to GW150914 as the "first detection" and GW151226 as the "new detection".)

Read the paper on the detection here.


THE SIGNAL & THE SOURCE

The signal is similar to the first detected gravitational wave (GW150914).  We call this kind of signal a "chirp" because initially it has a low frequency which increases over time as does its amplitude.  You've heard signals like this before if you've ever hear a slide whistle increasing in tone.  The increase in tone reflects the increase in frequency and the loudness of the whistle represents the amplitude.  The signal we detected starts at about 35 Hz (close to the frequency of the sound made by the second black key from the left on the piano) and reaches its highest frequency at about 450 Hz (very close to the A above middle C if you convert this signal into sound).

Graph of the 1-second signal of GW151226.  The red line is the prediction of what a gravitational wave from a 14.2 and 7.5 solar mass black hole merger would look like and the grey area around it is the signal that LIGO recovered from its data.  The zoomed in portions allow you to get a better look at hour the prediction (in red) and the actual signal (in grey) compare.  At the end of this signal, the frequency and amplitude both go up.  The two black holes merge at the point where the amplitude of the signal is the highest (seen in the zoomed data to the far right).

The plot above shows what we detected in our data compared to the predictions of a pair of black holes orbiting each other and merging into one.  So this is similar to the last detection in that this is also a pair of stellar-mass black holes (formed from the death of extremely massive stars) but different because the masses of these new black holes are less than the first detection.  Here, our newly detected black holes are 14.2 and 7.5 solar masses where our last detection was 36.2 and 29.1 solar masses.  That makes this signal weaker than the last (the peak amplitude of this new signal is about 1/3 that of the first detection) but we are able to observe more orbits of the system here.  We see about 27 orbits of these new black holes (corresponding to the 55 cycles of the gravitational wave we see in the figure) where we only saw about 5 orbits (or 10 cycles) in the first detection.  It is interesting to note that lower mass black hole pairs will merge at higher frequencies than higher mass black holes.  This means that the signal will stay in LIGO's most sensitive frequencies longer and that is reflected in what we see here.  This new detection's signal is about 1 second long while the first detection is less than a half second long.

So, what did this new detection look and sound like?  As far as what it looked like, there was no light that we are aware of that was produced from this system.  But we can visualize the black holes as they orbit around each other and track the corresponding progression through the signal to the merger.  [Credit: SXS Collaboration/www.black-holes.org]:

We can also "listen" to gravitational waves by taking the signal, and converting it into sound through your speakers.  Below is a comparison of what the new detection "sounded" like compared to the first detection.  The actual "sounds" are quite low in tone so that they sound more like thumps.  We also have shifted the sounds up to a higher tone so that you can hear more of the detail in the signals.  That will play after the original lower tones.  The background graph shows how the frequency changes on the vertical axis (you will see that it increases for both signals) as time progresses on the horizontal axis:

The next question is where in the sky are these black holes?  We primarily determine this using the delay in detection time between the two detectors.  When the delay is large, there is a smaller area in the shape of a ring on the sky where the gravitational wave could have come from.  The detection delay for the new detection is much shorter than the first detection, so our uncertainty is going to be larger.  Below is an illustration of the areas on the sky where the new detection (the area to the left) and the first detection (the area to the right) are likely to have come from.  Note that for the new detection on the left, there is another similar area on the opposite side of the sky that cannot be seen in this image.

The location of both the new GW151226 detection (on the left) and the first detection, GW150914 (on the right).  These are pictured on a star map (you can see the center part of the Milky Way galaxy on the left and extending right).  There is another similar area for the new detection on the opposite side of the sky (not pictured here).  The outer purple area is where we are 90% confident where the sources are located.  The inner circles each have decreasing certainty.

We will be better able to determine the location of a gravitational wave source on the sky when we have more than two detectors in operation.  Fortunately, Advanced Virgo has completed their upgrades and is currently testing their new detector.  LIGO's next observing run is expected in the 4th quarter of this year and Advanced Virgo will likely join the search before the completion of that run.  When we detect more gravitational waves (which we expect since we will be even more sensitive than we were for the two detections we have already made and the run will be longer in duration) together with Virgo, we will know even more about what it is that we are seeing.

This is an exciting time to be a scientist!

Read the official LIGO "Science Summary" on this new detection, GW151226.

The Source of GW150914: Stellar Mass Black Holes

On September 14th, 2015, LIGO made the first direct detection of gravitational waves.  This event is labeled GW150914 (referring to the year, month, and day of the detection).  The objects that produced the GW150914 were a pair of stellar mass black holes that orbited each other and gradually moved closer and closer together over the course of eons.  The closer together they became, the faster they orbited around each other and the stronger the gravitational waves produced.  LIGO detected the last 0.2 seconds of these stars orbiting until they became so close they merged into a single black hole.

While we saw the death of this paired (binary) system, we didn't get to observe other parts of its life.  Where did these black holes come from?  To answer this question, we need to apply what we know about stellar evolution.


STELLAR MASS BLACK HOLES ARE CORPSES

There are several classes of black holes, determined by their mass and how they were formed: stellar mass black holes, intermediate mass black holes, and supermassive black holes.  For stellar mass black holes, they formed when the most massive of stars (more than 15-20 times the mass of our Sun) run out of nuclear fuel and gravity takes over and collapses the star.  For smaller stars, this collapse stops when the pressure from inside the atom (neutron pressure) equals the pressure from the gravitational collapse.  But for these more massive stars, there is no pressure that can stop the collapse and a black hole is formed.  It is in this way stellar mass black holes are the corpses of the most massive stars (but these kinds of black holes are among the least massive).  The newly merged GW150914 black hole now holds the record for the largest stellar mass black hole known.

There are several theories about how this happens... Sometimes this collapse is accompanied by an explosion called a hypernova and is believed to be the source for a kind of gamma-ray burst.  Sometimes the gravity of the collapsing star is so great that all of the matter and light gets sucked into it even if there was a hypernova-like explosion.   


THE EVOLUTION OF THE GW150914 SYSTEM

But how did two stellar mass black holes come to be paired together?  A likely explanation is that they also lived their lives together as a binary star system.  This is very common as it is estimated that about 1 out of 3 stars are in systems of 2 or more stars.  This binary system would likely have formed together and lived their entire lives paired.  The more massive of the 2 stars would have died first since the more massive the star, the faster it burns through its fuel.  Once the nuclear fuel ran out, the more massive star collapsed into a black hole making the system a star/black hole system.  Eventually, the second star would run out of fuel and collapse into a black hole as well making our stellar black hole binary system.  These black holes would orbit for eons before they were close enough to merge and produce the gravitational waves LIGO detected.

In a recent paper (see reference below or read it here), simulations of millions of stars with different material compositions (specifically metalicity which, to an astronomer, is anything that isn't hydrogen or helium; the Sun is 2% 'metal') were simulated and some produced similar outcomes to what we observed.  What was found was that there were similar characteristics for the stars the went on to resemble the GW150914 binary system and this gives us estimates on the time needed for each stage in the system's evolution from birth to the gravitational-wave-generating merger.

The two stars were born about 2 billion years after the Big Bang and were each somewhere between 40 to 100 times the mass of our Sun.  These low metalicity stars (only about 0.06% 'metal') orbit each other as stars for about 4 million years until the more massive one collapses into a black hole.  The now star-black hole system orbit each other for another 1.5 million years until the other star collapses into a black hole.  Both of these stars were massive enough that there wouldn't have been a hypernova-like explosion for either of them; any material ejected would have fallen back into the black hole.  Our new black hole binary system, which is just the corpses of once very massive stars, now go on to orbit each other for over 10 billion years - that is 1000 times longer than the either star was a alive.  At the end of that time, they merge and produce the gravitational waves that LIGO detected 1.3 billion years later when they arrived at Earth.


WHAT WILL HAPPEN NOW?

The short answer: nothing.  This new single black hole is spinning (it is the first detection of a Kerr rotating black hole) but its shape and center of mass are not moving in a way that will ever produce gravitational waves again.   Gravitational waves are also the only way this system would ever have been detected since there wasn't any matter (like dust or gas) to fall into the black holes and generate X-rays.  We will never be able to observe this black hole again.

Of course, there are extremely unlikely events like another black hole flying by and crashing into it...  That may make new gravitational waves for us to see (but I wouldn't hold my breath).


Reference:

K. Belczynski, D. Holz, T. Bulik, R. O'Shaughnessy, "The origin and evolution of LIGO's first gravitational-wave source" arXive e-Print: 1602.04531 (2016).

LIGO Makes the First Direct Detection of Gravitational Waves

On morning of 14 September 2015 at almost 4:51 am in Louisiana (09:50:45 UTC) the LIGO detectors in Livingston, LA and Hanford, WA detected a gravitational-wave signal we've labeled GW150914 (based on the date).  The online (near real-time) data analyses alerted scientists about 3 minutes later that there was something of substantial interest in the data.  While vetting this signal (that only lasted about a half of a second) took a substantial amount of time, it opened the new field of gravitational-wave astronomy.  We had not only made the first direct detection of gravitational waves but we also made the first direct detection of a black hole binary (pair) system and proved that these kinds of systems really do exist (it was contentious because the formation of one of the black holes was expected to have destroyed the star that would have made its partner).

At the time of the posting of this blog, the press conference making the announcement is going on and I am working the satellite event being held at the Livingston Observatory.  I will be sure to update this post with the link to the recording or the announcement later (update: see the bottom of this post).  There is too much to talk about in just this post, so I am going to keep this to the basics: what did we see and what does it mean?  I will be doing a series of posts about what we did to make sure that this is a real gravitational wave, the astrophysics of the source, how we detected it, the creation of black holes and why finding a pair like we did is important to astronomy.

Update: Read the Physical Review Letters journal article here.


THE SIGNAL

This gravitational-wave detection was seen as a common signal between the two LIGO sites:

This image shows the data (top row), signal (middle row), and what's left over after the signal is subtracted from the data (bottom row).  Detailed discussion on each image is provided below.

What you see here is a series of images (above and in detail below) that picks apart the signal that was detected.  In the left column is information focusing on the Hanford Observatory and on the right the Livingston Observatory.

TOP ROW:

The vertical (Y-axis) units are strain with a scale of 10^-21.

In the top row is the signal that was seen.  However, this is not the raw data as it was collected.  What you see here is data that has been filtered to 1) reduce noise and 2) to include only frequency components that are around the frequency range of the signal itself.  The red graph on the left is the signal as seen at Hanford and on the left the blue trace is as seen at Livingston.  For comparison, the light red line under the blue Livingston line is the Hanford signal that has been shifted in time to account for the travel time between detectors and flipped (multiplied by -1) to match the orientation of the arms (the arms of each site have a opposite orientation compared to each other so the positive signal in one detector will be negative in the other).  The common signal can be seen with the noise in this comparison.

MIDDLE ROW:

The vertical (Y-axis) units are strain with a scale of 10^-21.

These plots compare the signal predicted by numerical relativity (which are results of computer simulations where the predictions of general relativity cannot be solved by in explicit mathematical expressions) for a pair of black holes with one mass 36 times the mass of our Sun and the other 29 times.  (The red line in the left plot for Hanford and the blue line on the right for Livingston.)  Beneath each of these lines are grey shadowed areas that show the signal as detected from actual LIGO data with two different independent data analysis methods (wavelet and template).  Here again, we can see that the predictions and observations match well.

BOTTOM ROW:

The vertical (Y-axis) units are strain with a scale of 10^-21.

These are plots of residual signals which are the noise that this left behind when the gravitational-wave signal is removed.  Seeing that there is no pattern left in these plots supports that what was seen was a real common signal - a real gravitational wave (this is necessary for a gravitational wave detection but not sufficient - the extra investigations performed will be the subject of a future post).


THE SPECTROGRAM

A powerful tool in signal analysis is breaking up a signal into its frequency components in a graph called a spectrogram.  It allows us to see how much of a signal is made up different frequencies at different times.  If you can hear, then you do this everyday.  It is how you are able to pick apart the sound of a tuba from the sound of a flute when you listen to a symphony.  Both are playing at the same time, but you don't confuse their sounds as coming from anything else.

Below is the spectrogram of this gravitational wave detection:

The horizontal (X-axis) is the progression of time (like above) and the vertical (Y-axis) is showing the contribution of each possible frequency.  The more yellow at a frequency, the stronger that frequency's contribution to the signal at that time.  Our gravitational wave starts at a low frequency (about 35 Hz) and increases to higher frequency (about 250 Hz) near the end of the signal.  This is similar to a signal a slide whistle increasing tone would produce.


WHAT WOULD THIS SOUND LIKE?

As I've mentioned in a previous post, the frequencies of gravitational waves that LIGO is sensitive to would be audible if they were sound waves (which they aren't).  Because of this, we can make them into sound waves by putting the signal through a speaker.  So we did!

Because the starting frequency of the gravitational wave is very low, it is difficult to hear.  The frequency is audible, but at that low of a frequency we tend to feel the sound vibration more than we hear it.  So unless you have a truly great subwoofer, you will probably only hear the end "whoop" of the signal.  In order to make the entire signal more audible, we shifted all of the frequencies up in the above sound up so you can hear the whole thing.  This is not unlike the false-color images made in astronomy for light that our eyes cannot see.

Now that you've heard the detected gravitational wave, you can see that when the tone of it becomes higher toward the end of the signal, the frequency in the spectrogram also goes up.


WHERE DID THE SIGNAL COME FROM?

Because the two LIGO detectors were the only detectors operating at the time of the event (Virgo in Italy is finishing their advanced detector upgrades and KAGRA in Japan is under construction with similar advanced instrumentation) it isn't easy to state precisely where the signal came from.  We can narrow it down to an area on the sky based on how long it took the gravitational wave to travel between the two LIGO detectors, and other factors like the strength of the signal in each detector (there is a slightly different response for each detector for different sky locations).  The most probable location is in the southern hemisphere around the constellations Volans and Carina:

The colored area on this map shows the most probable source of the detected gravitational wave where red is more likely than purple.  The location is shown against a map of the night sky centered on the Milky Way galaxy with constellations outlined.
[Credits: NASA Deep Star Maps (Visualization Credits, Ernie Wright (USRA): Lead Animator, Tom Bridgman (GST): Animator) by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio with constellation figures based on those developed for the IAU by Alan MacRobert of Sky and Telescope magazine (Roger Sinnott and Rick Fienberg), and the source location based on Gravoscope screen grabs (LIGO & Nick Risinger, skysurvey.org), all in galactic coordinates. Composition by University of Florida / S. Barke.]

 
WHAT MADE THIS GRAVITATIONAL WAVE?

Two different data analysis methods that look at the data in fundamentally different ways not only detected this event, but provided the same results for what the source of it was.  This gravitational wave was made by two stellar mass black holes (these are the remnants of extremely massive stars that have expended their fuel and collapsed under their own gravity).  As quoted above, their masses were about 29 and 36 times the mass of our Sun.  They orbited around each other for hundreds of thousands to millions of years before they come close enough together to start orbiting very quickly (much like an ice skater spins faster as they draw their arms into themselves).  LIGO was only sensitive to the very end of this process right before the two black holes merged into one black hole.  At the end, the stars had a relative velocity of about 1.8x10⁸ m/s, or 60% the speed of light (the universe's "speed limit").  Imagine that...  Two black holes that were each the size of cities but each about 30 times as massive as our Sun whirling around each other at more than half the speed of light!  The animation below shows what it may have looked like to see these black holes merge together.  Note that since they are black holes, no light come from them directly but they do bend the light that is coming from behind them in a process called gravitational lensing:

Based on how strong we know these gravitational waves were at their source as predicted by general relativity and how strong they were once they reached Earth, we estimate that this system is located about 1.3 billion light years (~410 Mpc) away.  That distance is about 10% of the way to the edge of the observable universe!  It also means that the gravitational waves we just detected have been traveling into the universe and toward us for 1.3 billion years.  When these gravitational wave were created the Earth was in the Proterozoic eon of Precambrian time, after when multicellular life developed but before animal life.

PRESS CONFERENCE RECORDING

Note:  Fast forward to 26:30.  It's just waiting before that. 

Next post: On the formation of stellar mass black hole and why this pair of them are interesting to astronomy...

Gravitational Waves Seen in the Polarization of Light From the Big Bang

THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND

The oldest light we can see in the Universe is called the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and it is the relic light from the Big Bang.  While this light is old, it isn't quite as old as our Universe.  Before an event called recombination, the Universe was not transparent to light, so the light couldn't propagate very far before being absorbed.  Recombination happened about 380,000 years after the Big Bang and the light from this time is what we observe in the CMB.

Everywhere we look on the sky, the frequency of this microwave light is very nearly the same.  Since heat can be transmitted through radiation (such as microwaves), we can characterize this light to have a temperature of about 3 K (or about 3 ^oC or 5.4 ^oF above absolute zero - the coldest anything in the Universe can be).  Why this temperature is the same everywhere on the sky doesn't immediately make sense since the heat hasn't had enough time to be transferred across the Universe.

The slight variations in the CMB temperature from opposite sides of the sky as measured by 9 years of data from the WMAP mission.  The fluctuation in the CMB temperature is measured to be ± 0.0002 ^oC (0.00036 ^oF).  [Source: Wikipedia]


The CMB is almost 14 billion light years away from us.  This is approximately the age of the Universe.  But there is no way for light to transfer heat from one side of the Universe (14 billion light years from us) and reach the other side (14 billion light years away from us in the opposite direction) since this would take about 28 billion years of travel time or twice the age of the Universe!  So there is no way that these widely separated parts of the Universe should have the same temperature if the Universe has expanded in a continuous way since the Big Bang.

To explain why the CMB is essentially in thermal equilibrium in every part of the Universe, something extraordinary needed to happen...


INFLATION

Almost immediately after the Big Bang, it is believed that the Universe entered a period of extremely rapid expansion called inflation.  This began at about 10^-35 seconds after the Big Bang and the Universe proceeded to expand its volume by about 80 orders of magnitude (that's a 1 followed by 80 zeroes) in a fraction of a second.  During this time, gravitational waves would have originally been produced on a quantum mechanical scale and then blown up to cosmological scales during inflation.  The gravitational waves from the Big Bang are exactly these fluctuations in space-time that are still vibrating from the period of inflation.  (The wavelength now is its original wavelength, i.e. about 1% of the size of the Universe as it was then, stretched by the amount the Universe has expanded since then.)


EVIDENCE OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVES IN THE CMB

Since gravitational waves were able to propagate through the early Universe long before light was, it is expected that there is evidence of these gravitational waves contained within the CMB.  We expect to see this in a special kind of polarization of the CMB (where polarization refers to the rotational orientation of the light waves).  There should be 2 kinds of polarization in the CMB, E-mode and B-mode.

A graphical history of the Universe showing when gravitational waves would have been created and how they affect matter along with density waves and their affect.  The effects that gravitational waves have on mattert cause B-mode polarization in the CMB while density waves are the primary contributors of E-mode polarization.  [Source: Wikipedia]

E-mode polarization means that the orientation of the polarization should not change as you move in a straight line.  B-mode polarization means that the rotation of the polarization changes or "curls" around itself.  The E and B in these mode names refer to how electric (E)  and magnetic (B) fields behave: a single charge will have an electric field pointing radially away from a single change while a magnet always have 2 poles causing the magnetic field to always curl back to the magnet.  The E-mode polarization in the CMB provides information about the fluctuation of density in the early Universe.  Because gravitational waves alternate, compressing space in one direction and expanding it in the orthogonal (at a right angle) direction, they caused the "curling" B-mode polarization.

Graphical illustration of the polarization patterns for E-modes and B-modes.  Note that B-mode patterns can be characterized by "rotating" clockwise or counter-clockwise while the E-modes cannot.  [Source: Press conference screen grab]

An experiment called BICEP2 (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization) announced to the world a few days before this post (17 March 2014) that they did indeed detect the B-mode polarization in the CMB.  The results are cataloged here.

The above image is the polarization of different points in the sky they observed from the South Pole.  The red colored areas are where the B-modes can be classified as clockwise and the blue colored areas are where they can be classified as counter-clockwise.

THIS IS THE IMPRINT OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVES FROM THE PERIOD OF INFLATION!

Any time scientists think they found something that they wanted to find, we immediately set to trying to disprove what we found.  (This is discussed on this blog in regard to LIGO with the blind injections known as "The Big Dog".)  After thorough vetting and analysis of this work, it has been determined that the chance of this B-mode signal has a chance of 1 in 3.5 million of being a false detection. 


WHAT THIS MEANS FOR LIGO AND SIMILAR DETECTORS

This discovery of the imprint of gravitational waves on the CMB further hints at the promise that gravitational-wave astronomy with detectors like LIGO will have in the future.  Their discovery in no way diminishes the potential of LIGO and gravitational-wave astronomy - instead it increases its promise.

LIGO seeks to work like a gravitational-wave radio and record the gravitational-wave signals directly.  (This analogy is discussed in more depth on this blog here.)  For this analogy, the information about what made the gravitational wave is the music being carried on the radio wave (the gravitational wave in this analogy).  In this sense, LIGO will be making a distinctly different kind of detection than BICEP2 did.  We will be directly recording a gravitational wave as it passes by Earth and BICEP2 detected the imprint of gravitational waves on the CMB.

Also, LIGO looks for a wider range of gravitational waves.  While we also look for the relic gravitational waves from the Big Bang which we call stochastic gravitational waves, we search for three other kinds: continuous, inspiral, and burst.  (These are described in more detail on this blog here.)  This broad range of gravitational waves that detectors like LIGO will be able to "see" will allow gravitational waves to tell their own story of how they were made; perhaps from the collapse of a star into a black hole or the merging of two stars into one, or the echoes of the birth of the Universe.  We will not be seeing the evidence of gravitational waves that is imprinted onto light, but collecting information from the gravitational waves themselves.

As a side note:  Kip Thorne, a physicist who has pioneered work in general relativity and gravitational waves, made a prediction in 2006 of what detections will be made with gravitational waves in the next 50 years:

"Over the next 50 years, gravitational waves from the big bang will be detected, first indirectly by the imprint they leave on the cosmic microwave radiation and then directly, by space-based gravitational wave observatories."

 You can read the rest of his prediction on NewScientist.com.

Read LIGO's official congratulatory statement on the BICEP2 results to the ligo.org web page.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR COSMOLOGY

The BICEP2 results do much more than suggest or support that inflation happened: it gives us some information about what happened during inflation.  The strength of the signals observed here informs us on the energy involved in inflation.  The ratio of the strength of the E-modes to the B-modes (a value referred to as r and measured here to be r = 0.2) is proportional to the energy density of the Universe at the time of inflation and this is consistent with energies needed in some of the grand unified theories (GUTs) (this is where the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces become indistinguishable).

The BICEP2 results also serve to constrain the theories of what happened during inflation.  Several of these have been ruled out (e.g. large field inflation models are now highly unlikely).

Ultimately, these results need to be reproduced and refined by coming experiments.  This doesn't mean that the scientific community isn't confident in BICEP2's results, but science needs to be reproducible.  And in reproducing results, they are often refined and expanded upon.

This truly is an exciting time to be a scientist!

See Also:

• Archive of the BICEP2 press conference can be found here (it is large so give it a little while to load).
• BICEP2 results page
• New York Time's article on BICEP2's results with an excellent description of how inflation explains why the CMB has nearly the same temperature everywhere.
• New Scientist's article on BICEP2 results

Silver and Gold: Clues to the History of Our Solar System

It's that time of year when many of us are buying gifts for our loved ones.  And there's a song from the old Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special that comes to mind (sung by the character Yukon Cornelius):  "Silver and gold, silver and gold.  How many wonders can one cavern hold?..."    But have you ever stopped to think about where your jewelery came from?  I don't mean how your silver and gold was mined, but how was it created?  It's much more interesting than anything you've probably imagined!

SILVER & GOLD

Gold crystal (image from Wikipedia)

First, let's go back to the birth of the Universe:  BANG!  (That was the Big Bang.)  Sometime between 10 seconds and 20 minutes from now, the first atoms will be formed (this is called Big Bang nucleosynthesis).  These first atoms were of the simplest elements in the periodic table; mostly hydrogen and some helium and lithium.  Even today, the most common elements in the Universe are hydrogen and helium.  A few hundred million years later, clouds of this material will collapse to form the first stars.  This birth is marked by the ignition of nuclear fusion: the smashing of lighter elements together to make heavier ones.  All stars start by smashing 2 hydrogen (H) atoms together to make a helium (He) atom.  Eventually, the star will start to run out of hydrogen and will start to fuse helium to make beryllium (Be) and carbon (C).  The largest stars will continue fusing atoms together until the product element is iron (Fe).  For elements lighter than iron, smashing two lighter elements together to make a heavier element will release some energy.  For elements heavier than iron, breaking an atom into two lighter atoms will release energy: this is called nuclear fission.  So, the heaviest element that any star can normally make during its life is iron.  Heavier elements like silver (Ag), gold (Au), and platinum (Pt) and many other elements can only be created in the most extreme environments such as a supernova explosion that marks the death of a star.  Therefore, the metal in our jewelery is truly a relic of a star that died before our Sun was born.

Our Sun and solar system was born from the supernova explosion of an older star that died and, in doing so, seeded the material that makes up our solar system with heavier elements (this is the nebular hypothesis).  For example, since the Earth is not a star it cannot perform nuclear fusion.  Yet the core of our planet is primarily iron and nickel and had to be made in a previous star.  This is what Carl Sagan meant in his famous quote, "We are all starstuff."


WHAT ABOUT DIAMONDS?

Diamond set into a gold ring (image from Wikipedia)

 While I'm on the topic of the exotic origins of jewelery (and many other things), let me talk a little about why our Sun may turn into a giant diamond.

First off, a diamond is made from carbon which our Sun is capable of making much later in its life (more on this in a little bit).  Carbon is everywhere around us - pretty much every molecule that isn't water in your body has at least one carbon atom in it (this is the definition of an organic compound).  What makes a diamond special from all of the other common forms of carbon is that it has a very specific crystal structure that is only formed under extreme pressure and heat.  (Any mineral that has the same chemical structure but a different crystalline organization is called a polymorph.)  So, the diamonds that are formed naturally on Earth started as a carbon deposit that transformed into a diamond under the extreme pressure and temperatures found beneath the surface of the Earth.

What does this have to do with our Sun?  Well, right now the Sun is busy turning hydrogen into helium.  It will eventually (in about 5 billion years) start making heavier elements, but only much more massive stars ever have enough oomph (enough mass to create the most extreme pressures) to fuse elements all the way up to iron.  Our Sun is not one of those stars (which is good since those massive stars live comparatively short lives).  The Sun will only be able to produce up to carbon and oxygen (O) before fusion stops and the outer layers of the Sun are blown into the interstellar medium to seed future stars and solar systems.  What is left behind is called a white dwarf composed of carbon that has been exposed to intense pressure and temperatures.  That means that the white dwarf our Sun leaves behind may very well be a diamond!

A white dwarf that could be a massive diamond has already been observed and nicknamed "Lucy" (after the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds").  It is more massive than the white dwarf our Sun will leave behind, but seems to be created by the same processes we expect for our Sun.  All of this is very promising for a diamond to be the memorial for our Sun (and solar system).


WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH GRAVITATIONAL WAVES?

Directly, not much.  However, this past August it was confirmed that a short gamma-ray burst was the result of a kilonova, the collision of two neutron stars that releases a massive amount of energy (read more about this here and see my comments towards the end of the article).  Neutron stars are the remnants of dead stars that were much more massive than our Sun (about 10 to 40 times the mass of our Sun) that died in a supernova.  Those past supernovae would have created silver, gold, and everything heavier than iron and seeded the interstellar medium for future stars and solar systems.

These kilonova sources should produce copious amounts of gravitational waves, however, there has never been a short gamma-ray burst (like the one I mentioned above) detected close enough for LIGO to see it.  Once Advanced LIGO is complete (soon!) the closest short gamma-ray burst will be just on the edge of the distance we expect to be able to detect these kinds of gravitational waves.  But the great thing about what we do is that we really don't know how strong the gravitational waves from the actual explosion will be so they could very well be detectable in the future.

Fingers crossed!

Black Holes 101

Most of what I discuss on this blog has to do directly with gravitational waves.  This time I'd like to talk about one of their most talked about exotic sources: black holes.  Black holes are an exemplary source because they are highly concentrated mass.  Just add a touch of accelerated motion and gravitational waves are emitted in abundance (well, it's not quite that simple and "abundance" is a relative term, but you get the idea).  But what are the fundamental concepts that add up to the existence of black holes?  That's what we are focusing on now.


1.  Escape velocity

You've probably noticed that the harder you throw an ball straight up in the air, the higher it goes.  We also know that the farther away the ball gets from the Earth, the lower the gravitational attraction is between the ball and the Earth.  When you connect these two concepts, you can imagine that there is a speed at which you can throw the ball up and it will never come back down.  This is called the escape velocity:

We have discussed escape velocity before on this blog (specifically when discussing the conditions an object must have to be 'eaten' by a black hole).  In this equation, G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass of the 'thing' you are trying to escape, and r is the distance you are from the center of the 'thing'.  The bigger the mass of the 'thing', M, is, the faster the object must be thrown to escape it, v_e.

Going back to throwing a ball up in the air from the Earth's surface, you would need to throw that ball about 25,000 mph so that the ball would not come back to the Earth (good luck with that)!


2.  The speed of light is the universal 'speed limit'

Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light (in a vacuum), represented by c.  No matter, energy, or information about the Universe can travel faster than that.  That is pretty much the long and the short of this concept.

[Source: Knight Science Journalism at MIT blog]

This 'speed limit' comes from Einstein's special relativity and the effect of simultaneity.  Perhaps I will write a longer post about this in the future, but all that is important now is to recognize that if something needed to travel faster than the speed of light to communicate information to you, then you are never going to know about it.


3.  Light is affected by gravity

Light is both a particle and a wave.  As a particle, it has no mass.  Since gravity acts between two masses, it may be surprising that light can be affected by gravity at all!  But it does.  This effect is called gravitational lensing and I've written about this previously here. 


CONCLUSION:  How these concepts form a black hole

The simplest black hole is called a Schwarzschild black hole.  This is a black hole that has no electrical charge and is not rotating - it's just "there" meaning that there won't be anything to complicate our black hole situation.  For now, let us think of our black hole as having mass but no volume.  You can think of this as being the ultimate implosion.  Since this mass has no volume, there isn't any surface to it.  Eventually, as we get closer and closer to where the mass is centered, the escape velocity will become so large that the escape velocity will be greater than the speed of light.  And since light is indeed affected by gravity, that means that nothing will be able to escape the black hole.  We can even figure out what this distance is from the equation for escape velocity by setting v_e to the speed of light, c, and solving for r (the distance away from the mass where the escape velocity equals the speed of light):

This distance from a black hole where light will not be able to emerge from a black hole is also called the event horizon and this sphere around the black hole is what is being referred to when we talk about the size of the back hole.  For this simple Schwarzschild black hole, it is also known as the Schwarzschild radius.  You can also think of this radius as how small a mass would have to be to become a black hole.

So, how big would the Schwarzschild radius be for some things we are familiar with?  Well, for a black hole with the mass of our Sun it would be just about 3 km or about 1.9 miles.  For a black hole with the mass of the Earth it would be 8.87 mm or a little under 11/32" (0.349 in).

SNEWS and LIGO: Neutrinos Tell of Possible Gravitational Wave

When I start off a tour at the LIGO Observatory, I usually start by talking about how gravitational waves will open a new window to view the Universe.  I've done this so many times that I have the talking point pretty much memorized:

"Up until recently, we've only been able to observe the Universe using light and its different forms.  Visible light, X-rays, and microwaves are just a few different kinds of light and every time we have looked at the Universe in a new way, we discovered something unexpected that revolutionized our understanding of the Universe.

Well, light has the inconvenient property of being fairly easily absorbed or reflected away from its path.  However, the Universe is transparent to gravitational waves; meaning that they can go through matter and come out the other side unchanged.  There is no such thing as a gravitational-wave shadow!"

Note that I start by saying that until recently all of astronomy has used light as its tool.  This is because there is another medium that has been used: neutrinos.  I've talked a bit about neutrinos previously here, namely when I discussed the debunking of the "faster-than-light neutrino" claim last year and how neutrinos are used in multi-messenger astronomy.  Quoting the important part from the multi-messenger astronomy post:

"Today, we can do astronomy with means other than light.  For example, neutrinos.  These are subatomic particles that have no electric charge, have nearly no mass, travel very near the speed of light and are able to pass through matter almost undisturbed.  However, these properties add up to make it very hard to detect neutrinos (did you know that there are billions of neutrinos from the Sun passing through your body every second?!).  Neutrinos are also emitted when a star dies in an explosion called a supernova.  That means we may observe the optical burst of light AND the neutrinos from a single supernova.  Any time that you can observe the same event in multiple ways, you almost always learn more than if you only observed it one way."

- 14 October 2010

What I didn't go into is that LIGO is working to detect gravitational waves from a supernova as well.  While we can do this without complementary detections from traditional and neutrino observatories, having that information from them will make it easier for us to find the signal buried under the detector noise that dominates what LIGO records.  This is done through the Supernova Early Warning System (SNEWS).

SNEWS

Yes, this is pronounced just like you pronounce "snooze".  A SNEWS alert is sent out shortly after neutrinos from a supernova (as opposed to neutrinos from the Sun) are detected.  Since neutrinos and travel through matter with very little disturbance just like gravitational waves, that means that if we saw neutrinos, there is also a good chance that we may see the gravitational waves from that event.  Even more compelling for us in the gravitational wave community is that SNEWS only really expects to see neutrinos from a supernova if it came from within the Milky Way galaxy (or the Magellanic Clouds that are two small galaxies that orbit the Milky Way).  As far as gravitational waves are concerned, that is in our own backyard so any accompanying gravitational waves would likely be large enough for us to detect!   (When searching for gravitational waves in general, we expect that almost all of our sources will come from galaxies outside of the Milky Way.)


EARLY WARNING SYSTEM?

The reason that the detection of neutrinos is considered an "early warning system" for a supernova is that the processes that produce these neutrinos happen hours to days before the optical explosion that traditional observatories would be able to see.  The supernova explosion occurs after the mass of the star collapses in on itself; this is called a core collapse.  Neutrinos are normally produced by the nuclear fusions inside the star (our Sun produces MANY all the time), but during the core collapse many more are produced (it is estimated that over 90% of the energy in the collapse is expended as neutrinos).  It is also during the core collapse, when so much of the star's mass is in motion, that gravitational waves are produced.  If there is a SNEWS alert, that means that there is a higher probability of a gravitational wave detection at that time.


WHAT HAPPENS AT LIGO DURING A SNEWS ALERT?

First off, let me say that there has not been a SNEWS alert yet since these supernovae in our galaxy are rare (they happen about every 50 years or so that we are aware of).  But if a SNEWS alert comes through while LIGO is looking for gravitational waves, the protocol is quite simple: don't do anything that would cause the quality of the data to be degraded.  More specifically, don't create vibrations.  Don't walk close to the detector (your footsteps appear to be little earthquakes to the detector), don't leave the site in an automobile (any acceleration by that a car or larger vehicle will create a little wave in the ground that will affect the detector).  This has brought up the question of what to do with the FedEx guy if he is on site making a delivery...  While we cannot hold anyone against their will, I am sure that he would be asked to stick around for a while. 

This may sound a little harsh, but considering the rarity of these events and what is to be gained, sitting around isn't all that bad!


WHAT IS TO BE GAINED?

First, to the traditional astronomy community (telescopes detecting light), it is exceedingly rare to see a supernova from its beginning and doing so can tell astronomers more about what kind of supernova it is (see this Wikipedia page for more information about the different types of supernovae).

Also, if the gravitational waves from the core collapse of a star were to be detected, this will allow us to "see" what went on inside the star - something that can never be done with traditional astronomy.  Knowing what goes on inside the star will allow us to use the dying star as a nuclear reactor unlike any we could ever create on Earth.  This may be able to tell us more about nuclear physics which could have implications for technology in the future (I have no idea what those may be).


NEUTRINOS AND SUPERNOVA IN THE PAST

So far, there are only two detected sources of neutrinos other than those produced by nuclear reactions on Earth: those from the Sun and those from the supernova known as SN 1987A.

NASA image of 1987A supernova remnant near the center.  Inset: a close up of the supernova  [Source: Wikipedia]

SN 1987A happened on 23 February 1987 (hence the name) and was located in the (relatively) nearby Large Magellanic Cloud and could be seen from the Southern Hemisphere.  About 2-3 hours before the star exploded (as seen from Earth), neutrinos were detected at 3 different neutrino detectors.  This detection not only was the birth of neutrino astronomy, but also allowed for the early observation of the light from the supernova.

Also, this supernova is thought by some to be the instigator of the LIGO concept.  This was when Joseph Weber made his claims of the first detection of gravitational waves (which was debunked - but that is a discussion for another blog post).  Weber used a method of looking for gravitational waves called a resonant bar gravitational-wave detector (a.k.a. Weber Bar).  Even though there wasn't a gravitational-wave detection, his claims and SN 1987A made scientists begin to consider other way to look for gravitational waves and that the technology needed was within reach.  So, that February day in 1987 was also the birth of LIGO in a way!