
Gravitational Waves Exist: The Story of How Scientists Finally Found Them - donohoe
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/gravitational-waves-exist-heres-how-scientists-finally-found-them
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donkeyd
Could somebody explain what this discovery means for science? Are there any
functional applications for this?

Note that I'm more of an innovator than a scientist, so I always like to think
about applications for new scientific discoveries.

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anthotny
As the end of the article discusses, this means that scientists have a whole
new way of observing the universe. What we saw before was mostly along the EM
spectrum—radio waves, visible light, etc. This is a way of looking at
distortions in the actual fabric of spacetime.

Hard to say what the practical applications will be, but it's akin to asking
Galileo what the practical applications of a telescope are. There probably
aren't any if you're a 17th-century merchant or something, but a few decades
down the line…

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sktrdie
It seems to my understanding that the power needed for us measure the
gravitational waves needs to be enormous - so big in fact that these colliding
events only happen once every 10000 years. Can we use gravitational waves also
to measure other stuff and not just super powerful rare events?

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mchahn
> so big in fact that these colliding events only happen once every 10000
> years.

If you read the article you would see that they expect to see events daily
within a few years. It will become similar to optical observations with
telescopes.

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iofj
Exactly, and the big thing there is that these accelerations happen
conveniently before the interesting events.

When 2 neutron stars circle each other, they'll start sending out
gravitational waves. This will start to occur centuries before they collide,
but they increase exponentially until the collision happens. Today they cross
the detection threshold a few minutes before the actual collision, depending
on their size. If we can get that up to a few hours or a few weeks we can use
this to point every telescope in the world in the right direction before the
flash of the collision happens.

So an immediate application is simple : it gives us advance warnings of large
events in the cosmos. This means a lot of instruments dedicated to studying
huge-energy events no longer has to look at the entire night sky, or get
lucky, but we can actually get a signal before they happen.

In theory, if we can get the instruments accurate enough, we should be able to
detect even smaller events like a supernova. A gravitational wave should be
generated a few hours before the flash.

