OzGrav

  • Home
  • About
    • Vision & Mission
    • Join OzGrav
    • Mental Health and Wellbeing
    • Getting started in OzGrav
    • Funding opportunities >
      • Sponsorship request form
      • International Visitor funding program
      • Student and Postdoc funding
      • Carer grant
      • GWIC 3G Funding
      • Research Translation Seed Grants
    • Diversity and Inclusion
    • Code of Conduct
    • OzGrav Mentoring Program
    • Nodes & Partners
    • Facilities & Capabilities
    • Reports >
      • Annual Reports
      • Industry Success Stories
      • Strategic Plan
  • Our People
    • Chief Investigators
    • Partner Investigators
    • Associate Investigators
    • Postdocs and Students >
      • Faces of OzGrav
    • Professional & Outreach staff
    • Governance Advisory Committee
    • Scientific Advisory Committee
    • Executive Committee
    • Equity & Diversity Committee
    • Early Career Researcher Committee
    • Professional Development Committee
    • Research Translation Committee
    • OzGrav Alumni
  • Research Themes
    • Instrumentation
    • Data/Astro
    • How to write a research brief
  • Education and Outreach
  • Events
    • OzGrav-2
    • Upcoming and Past Events >
      • 2020 OzGrav Annual Retreat
  • News/Media
    • News
    • Newsletter
    • Binary Neutron Star Discovery
  • Contact Us
  • Home
  • About
    • Vision & Mission
    • Join OzGrav
    • Mental Health and Wellbeing
    • Getting started in OzGrav
    • Funding opportunities >
      • Sponsorship request form
      • International Visitor funding program
      • Student and Postdoc funding
      • Carer grant
      • GWIC 3G Funding
      • Research Translation Seed Grants
    • Diversity and Inclusion
    • Code of Conduct
    • OzGrav Mentoring Program
    • Nodes & Partners
    • Facilities & Capabilities
    • Reports >
      • Annual Reports
      • Industry Success Stories
      • Strategic Plan
  • Our People
    • Chief Investigators
    • Partner Investigators
    • Associate Investigators
    • Postdocs and Students >
      • Faces of OzGrav
    • Professional & Outreach staff
    • Governance Advisory Committee
    • Scientific Advisory Committee
    • Executive Committee
    • Equity & Diversity Committee
    • Early Career Researcher Committee
    • Professional Development Committee
    • Research Translation Committee
    • OzGrav Alumni
  • Research Themes
    • Instrumentation
    • Data/Astro
    • How to write a research brief
  • Education and Outreach
  • Events
    • OzGrav-2
    • Upcoming and Past Events >
      • 2020 OzGrav Annual Retreat
  • News/Media
    • News
    • Newsletter
    • Binary Neutron Star Discovery
  • Contact Us

The astrophysical odds of GW151216

18/8/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
Artistic illustration of a binary black hole. Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

​Every ten seconds or so, a pair of black holes or neutron stars collide somewhere in the
Universe. These collisions generate gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of space and time—which are observed on Earth using hyper-sensitive laser interferometers, based in the US and Italy. However, the detectors are not sensitive enough to see every collision, only those that are sufficiently close by.
 
The data from the detectors is publicly available, allowing scientists from around the world to
check the findings of the LIGO and Virgo collaborations who operate the detectors. Open
data also allows outside groups to try new ways to find signals, providing healthy competition
for LIGO and Virgo! Last year, a group from Princeton did just this—nalysing the open data, they found a new binary black hole candidate called GW151216.
 
One way to ascertain if a candidate gravitational-wave event is real is to look for consistent signals in two or more observatories. Using this principle, a team of researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence of Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), at Monash University, developed a new method to determine if candidate gravitational-wave events are real.
 
OzGrav researcher Dr Greg Ashton likens the detection of gravitational-wave signals to
listening to sounds in the night: “Imagine that you wake in the middle of the night to a
strange noise. You turn to your partner to ask if they heard it too. If you both describe the same sound, then you are unlikely to have imagined it. We use the same idea. We compare the signal between the detectors and against known terrestrial noise”.
 
In their study,  Ashton and his collaborator, Prof Eric Thrane, applied their method to the candidate GW151216 and found that there’s only a 3% chance that it’s real.
 
“We would’ve liked to conclude that it is real event,” says Ashton. “As the number of gravitational-wave detections grows, it will become increasingly important to assess the
provenance of candidate events to ensure we draw conclusions from bona fide gravitational-wave signals.”
 
Ashton and Thrane are now looking to further develop their method and apply it the many other candidates in the data.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

         


    OzGrav News


    Archives

    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    December 2016
    September 2016
    June 2016
    February 2016

    Categories

    All
    Event
    Media

      Keep up to date with ozgrav news and events

    Subscribe to Newsletter

    RSS Feed

Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
We acknowledge and pay respects to the Elders and Traditional Owners of the land on which our six Australian nodes stand

​© 2020   The ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational  Wave Discovery (OzGrav)
Banner images: An artist's impression of gravitational waves generated by binary neutron stars.  Credits: R. Hurt/Caltech-JPL
Picture