Gravitational Waves Ripping Apart Whole Planets?

While most nerds are content to argue over whether Batman could take Wolverine in a fight, the ones at the Dead Planets Society are busy with bigger questions like, could a gravitational wave rip apart an entire planet? The latest episode of the New Scientist-owned podcast takes a godlike approach to the cosmos and tries to figure out if you could move celestial bodies around like chess on a chessboard, would it be possible to put two black holes near a planet in such a way that the resulting gravitational waves could pull it apart like a piece of monkey bread.

If the theoretical gravitational waves vibrated at the right frequency, they could potentially cause the Earth to stretch beyond its limit until it breaks into smaller chunks

Gravitational wave researcher Christopher Berry joined hosts Chelsea Whyte and Leah Crane on Dead Planet Society‘s most recent episode to discuss his area of expertise and whether or not gravitational waves could ever make an effective Death Star alternative.

What Causes Gravitational Waves?

Gravitational waves are usually caused by something extremely massive and dense, like a black hole, colliding with another black hole. the resulting cosmic ripples or “waves” radiate outward, disrupting space-time as they go. Because of how far away most of these space cataclysms are the waves that reach Earth are so miniscule they can only be detected with highly specialized instruments.The three podcasters started with the premise, “Is it possible to make a gravitational wave strong enough for humans to feel?” but the conversation quickly devolved into how to make waves big enough to destroy the Earth or, as Chelsea put it, “Yeah, or the solar system, or everything, everywhere.” According to Berry, the first problem would be distinguishing between gravitational waves and just plain gravity.

In the end the consensus seems to be that yes, you could use a gravitational wave to destroy a planet—or even a whole solar system if you so desired—but that the circumstances behind such a wave could never occur naturally.

“When you’re very close to a source of gravitational waves, at least the gravitational waves we’re talking about of, say, two black holes orbiting around each other, the space-time is really churned up, so it’s not so easy to distinguish a wave from the underlying gravity itself,” Berry explained.

Berry eventually settles on vibration as the key to making the Earth pull itself apart. If the theoretical gravitational waves vibrated at the right frequency, they could potentially cause the Earth to stretch beyond its limit until it breaks into smaller chunks. The conversation turns from there to a theoretical cosmic symphony of black holes placed in certain positions and at certain frequencies, generating waves at different notes.

Berry theorizes that you could send that signal in any direction in space and it would become a beautiful-sounding orchestra of pure destruction.

In the end the consensus seems to be that yes, you could use a gravitational wave to destroy a planet—or even a whole solar system if you so desired—but that the circumstances behind such a wave could never occur naturally.Only if one had the same control over the universe that a Minecraft player has over their own little world, could a scenerio be set up where planet-destroying gravitational waves could be generated.

In other words, don’t add”Pulled apart violently by a massive gravitational wave” to your 2023 bingo card just yet.

6th Edition of International Conference on Gravitational Waves

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Could a gravitational wave rip apart an entire planet?

When we detect gravitational waves, it’s because they are warping space and time by a tiny amount – but this episode of Dead Planets Society is about making one that is far more powerful

You may not feel it, but at every single moment you are being ever-so-slightly stretched and squeezed by ripples in space-time. These ripples, called gravitational waves, are caused by the movements of massive objects like black holes, and researchers have detected them warping Earth by minuscule amounts. But what if they warped Earth by non-minuscule amounts?

In this episode of Dead Planets Society, our hosts Chelsea Whyte and Leah Crane get curious about whether we could make a gravitational wave that would be strong enough to feel – and what that might be like – or even strong enough to rip apart a planet. This means manipulating black holes because they are the densest objects in the universe, so they are the most efficient gravitational wave machines out there.

But it isn’t as easy as just putting a pair of black holes next to the planet and smashing them together, because the gravity from the black holes would destroy the planet regardless of any waves involved.

 Gravitational wave researcher Christopher Berry joins Leah and Chelsea this episode to talk about tuning the frequency of gravitational waves to vibrate the whole planet apart, whether it would be possible to disassemble the entire solar system with gravitational waves and how to create a deadly black hole symphony that could beam its cosmic music across the universe.

Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish ideas about how to tinker with the cosmos – from punching a hole in a planet to unifying .

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WHEN BLACK HOLES COLLIDE: UNIVERSE-SHAKING EVIDENCE OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVE BACKGROUND SIGNAL FOUND

If you’ve ever watched a figure skater spinning on the ice, you might have noticed that they spin a lot faster when they tuck their arms and legs in and they slow down when they spread them out. That’s because rotational inertia is always conserved so objects with smaller diameters spin more quickly than larger objects with the same inertia. It’s a quirk of physics which allows skaters to spin until they puke and for the formation of pulsars. More on that in a minute.

Astronomers hit the ball out of the solar system when they named pulsars. They are as weird and as exotic as they sound, just as comfortable in a textbook as they are in actual space. In a Season 2 episode of Farscape (streaming now on Peacock!), the crew of Moya fly through a region of the uncharted territories known as The Five Pulsars. It is so named for the collection of pulsars it houses, which seem to affect some of the crew in unusual ways. As it turns out, there’s something stranger going on, just outside of their view.

The NANOGrav collaboration, an international team of scientists announced evidence of a gravitational wave background signal for the very first time. The news made headlines across all of the major science publications and has been the talk of science town since even before the announcement. So, what’s the big deal?

For most of humanity’s scientific career, we’ve been limited to the things we could actually see with our eyes. The invention of microscopes and telescopes expanded that view to the very small and the very far away, but even early astronomy was entirely optical. It wasn’t until later that we realized we could see more of the universe by looking for parts of the electromagnetic spectrum we can’t see.

Things like radio waves, X-rays, and infrared are all types of light, but their wavelengths are either too short or too long for our eyes to detect. We need machines to detect and translate that information for us. Over the last few decades, scientists have been working on new tools for detecting a totally different type of invisible signal, that of gravitational waves.

Most of the time astronomy is an activity which involves observing things in space, detecting gravitational waves is the practice of detecting movements in the fabric of spacetime itself. The existence of gravitational waves, the result of violent collisions of supermassive objects like black holes or neutron stars, was predicted decades ago but only confirmed in 2015. Researchers used LIGO, a pair of interferometers four kilometers on a side, made up of two perpendicular lasers to detect the merger of two black holes. Because we know the exact distance of the instrument and the precise speed of light, researchers know exactly how long it should take laser light to make the trip from one end of the instrument to the other. If the trip takes longer or shorter than it should, that’s a pretty good indication something is afoot.

When a gravitational wave passes through the instrument, the fabric of spacetime is stretched or compressed temporarily and the travel time of the laser light is altered. That’s how LIGO detects gravitational waves, but even it is limited in what it can see. Despite its huge length, LIGO can only detect short gravity waves with wavelengths measured in kilometers. Scientists suspected that much larger gravitational waves might be out there, but we didn’t have any good way to detect them. It would be like trying to see the curvature of the Earth from the ground. We needed a bigger instrument.


To pick up waves that large, astronomers needed an instrument larger than anything we could possibly construct. To detect low-frequency gravitational waves we would need an interferometer measured not in kilometers but in lightyears. Fortunately, scientists figured out a way to make the universe do the heavy lifting for us. And that’s where pulsars come back in.

When massive stars die, they sometimes explode in a violent supernova. The outer layers explode outward, spreading enriched chemicals across space, and they leave a solid core behind. That core is a neutron star with all of the rotational inertia of its former, larger self, but with a much tighter diameter. As a result, they spin wildly, sometimes hundreds of times a second.

These millisecond pulsars are scattered throughout the Milky Way and when their radio beams point toward Earth, we can detect their flickering light like distant cosmic lighthouses. Pulsars are useful because they pulse at such a consistent rate, allowing scientists to use them to measure the time between events against the background rate of pulses. Measuring the travel time of light across large distances is precisely how LIGO works, which got scientists thinking maybe they didn’t need to build a new instrument. They just needed to use the ones already there.

The NANOGrav team spent 15 years studiously measuring the distance to every pulsar they could find and documenting the time between pulses, looking for anomalies. In effect, they made an interferometer the size of the galaxy by stringing pulsars together and paying close attention to the travel time of their light.

Instead of measuring one event, like the black hole merger detected by LIGO in 2015, this new signal could represent the background gravitational waves of the universe. There are a couple of suspects for the source of the signal. It might be that we’re picking up the rumbles or black hole binaries spread out across the universe. As paired black holes orbit one another they drag nearby stars around with them. The drag slows them down and their orbits decay. As they get closer, gravitational perturbations ripple out through spacetime. Get enough black holes doing the tango and you might pick up a signal in the rumble of the cosmic dance floor.

Alternative explanations include interactions with dark matter or theoretical tangled cosmic strings. It might also be the quiet jostling left over from the early universe, potentially giving us a window into the bizarre physics of the Big Bang.

We’re in early days and we need more evidence before anyone will feel comfortable putting their chips down on one explanation or another. But we just figured out how to look at the universe a little more clearly, and whatever we end up seeing is sure to be exciting.

6th Edition of International Conference on Gravitational Waves

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Physicists Create New Model of Ringing Black Holes

 

A new analysis has revealed the presence of “nonlinear” effects contained in gravitational waves.

When two black holes merge to form a larger black hole, they create violent disturbances in the fabric of spacetime, generating gravitational waves that propagate outwards. Previous research on black hole mergers relied on linear mathematics to model the behavior of these waves, assuming that they did not interact with each other. However, a recent analysis has delved deeper into these collisions, uncovering nonlinear effects in the behavior of gravitational waves.

“Nonlinear effects are what happens when waves on the beach crest and crash” says Keefe Mitman, a Caltech graduate student who works with Saul Teukolsky (PhD ’74), the Robinson Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at Caltech with a joint appointment at Cornell University. “The waves interact and influence each other rather than ride along by themselves. With something as violent as a black hole merger, we expected these effects but had not seen them in our models until now. New methods for extracting the waveforms from our simulations have made it possible to see the nonlinearities.”

                     

In the future, the new model can be used to learn more about the actual black hole collisions that have been routinely observed by LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) ever since it made history in 2015 with the first direct detection of gravitational waves from space. LIGO will turn back on later this year after getting a set of upgrades that will make the detectors even more sensitive to gravitational waves than before.

Mitman and his colleagues are part of a team called the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes collaboration, or SXS. Founded by Teukolsky in collaboration with Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne (BS ’62), Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, at Caltech, the SXS project uses supercomputers to simulate black hole mergers. The supercomputers model how the black holes evolve as they spiral together and merge using the equations of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In fact, Teukolsky was the first to understand how to use these relativity equations to model the “ringdown” phase of the black hole collision, which occurs right after the two massive bodies have merged.

“Supercomputers are needed to carry out an accurate calculation of the entire signal: the inspiral of the two orbiting black holes, their merger, and the settling down to a single quiescent remnant black hole,” Teukolsky says. “The linear treatment of the settling down phase was the subject of my PhD thesis under Kip quite a while ago. The new nonlinear treatment of this phase will allow more accurate modeling of the waves and eventually new tests of whether general relativity is, in fact, the correct theory of gravity for black holes.”

The SXS simulations have proved instrumental in identifying and characterizing the nearly 100 black hole smashups detected by LIGO so far. This new study represents the first time that the team has identified nonlinear effects in simulations of the ringdown phase.

The SXS simulations have proved instrumental in identifying and characterizing the nearly 100 black hole smashups detected by LIGO so far. This new study represents the first time that the team has identified nonlinear effects in simulations of the ringdown phase.

In gravitational terms, this means that the simulations produce new types of waves. “If you dig deeper under the large waves, you will find an additional new wave with a unique frequency,” Mitman says.

In the big picture, these new simulations will help researchers to better characterize future black hole collisions observed by LIGO and to better test Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Says co-author Macarena Lagos of Columbia University, “This is a big step in preparing us for the next phase of gravitational-wave detection, which will deepen our understanding of gravity in these incredible phenomena taking place in the far reaches of the cosmos.”

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Gravitational Waves: New Portal to Explore the Universe

Gravitational waves, invisible ripples in the fabric of spacetime, have become a groundbreaking tool in astrophysics, opening new avenues for understanding the cosmos. The existence of these waves was first predicted by Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity in 1915, yet it took a century of technological advancements before scientists could confirm their existence in 2016.

This article delves into the intricacies of gravitational waves and their profound implications for cosmic exploration.

The Science Behind Gravitational Waves

According to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, spacetime is a four-dimensional fabric that embeds the universe. When massive objects accelerate or decelerate, they create distortions in this fabric - similar to how a spinning bowling ball would distort a rubber sheet. These distortions are gravitational waves. They propagate at the speed of light, compressing and stretching spacetime as they travel.

Detecting the Undetectable

Gravitational waves are extraordinarily weak, making their detection a challenge of astronomical proportions. The first direct detection was achieved by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2016. The detected waves originated from the collision of two black holes about 1.3 billion light years away.

LIGO employs two massive interferometers situated thousands of kilometers apart in the United States. Each interferometer uses laser beams bouncing between mirrors at the ends of two four-kilometer-long arms arranged in an "L" shape. As a gravitational wave passes through, it minutely distorts the space between the mirrors, causing the laser beam paths to fluctuate. These fluctuations, albeit minuscule, can be detected and analyzed to confirm the presence of a gravitational wave.

Gravitational Wave Astronomy

The detection of gravitational waves marked the dawn of a new era in astronomy. Traditional astronomy relies on electromagnetic waves (like visible light, X-rays, and radio waves) to observe cosmic objects. Gravitational waves offer a unique and complementary perspective.

Black Holes and Neutron Stars: The study of gravitational waves can provide insights into some of the most enigmatic celestial objects, such as black holes and neutron stars, that are often challenging to study through traditional methods. By observing the gravitational waves produced by their mergers, we can learn about their properties, such as mass, spin, and size.

Cosmology and The Early Universe: Gravitational waves could also revolutionize our understanding of the early universe. The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation, electromagnetic radiation that has provided much of our current understanding of the early universe, was emitted 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Gravitational waves, on the other hand, could offer insights from the very first moments after the Big Bang, providing a window into an era that is currently unobservable.

The Future of Gravitational Wave Astronomy

The future of gravitational wave astronomy is bright with plans for new and more sensitive detectors. The European Space Agency is planning a space-based observatory, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), which is expected to be operational in the 2030s. This ambitious project will detect low-frequency gravitational waves from supermassive black hole mergers and other cosmic events that are undetectable by earth-based observatories.

Moreover, collaborations like the Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) use pulsars - highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars that emit beams of electromagnetic radiation - to detect gravitational waves. They provide a unique way to probe the universe at frequencies much lower than LIGO and future space-based observatories can reach.

A New Era of Exploration

Gravitational waves are a transformative addition to our astronomical toolkit, offering a novel way to observe and understand the universe. They open up exciting possibilities for studying the most mysterious and powerful events in the cosmos and shine a light on the parts of the universe that have remained shrouded in darkness. As we continue to refine our detection techniques and broaden our explorations, we step further into a new era of cosmic discovery and understanding.

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Looking inside a neutron star: New model will improve insights gleaned from gravitational waves

The oscillations in binary neutron stars before they merge could have big implications for the insights scientists can glean from gravitational wave detection.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham have demonstrated the way in which these unique vibrations, caused by the interactions between the two stars' tidal fields as they get close together, affect gravitational-wave observations. The study is published in Physical Review Letters.

Taking these movements into account could make a huge difference to our understanding of the data taken by the Advanced LIGO and Virgo instruments, set up to detect gravitational waves—ripples in time and space—produced by the merging of black holes and neutron stars.

The researchers aim to have a new model ready for Advanced LIGO's next observing run and even more advanced models for the next generation of Advanced LIGO instruments, called A+, which are due to begin their first observing run in 2025.

Since the first gravitational waves were detected by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration in 2016, scientists have been focused on advancing their understanding of the massive collisions that produce these signals, including the physics of a neutron star at supra nuclear densities.

Dr. Geraint Pratten, of the Institute for Gravitational Wave Astronomy at University of Birmingham, is lead-author on the paper. He said, "Scientists are now able to get lots of crucial information about neutron stars from the latest gravitational wave detections. Details such as the relationship between the star's mass and its radius, for example, provide crucial insight into fundamental physics behind neutron stars. If we neglect these additional effects, our understanding of the structure of the neutron star as a whole can become deeply biased."

Dr. Patricia Schmidt, co-author on the paper and Associate Professor at the Institute for Gravitational Wave Astronomy, added, "These refinements are really important. Within single neutron stars we can start to understand what's happening deep inside the star's core, where matter exists at temperatures and densities we cannot produce in ground-based experiments. At this point we might start to see atoms interacting with each other in ways we have not yet seen—potentially requiring new laws of physics."

The refinements devised by the team represent the latest contribution from the University of Birmingham to the Advanced LIGO program. Researchers in the University's Institute for Gravitational Wave Astronomy have been deeply involved in design and development of the detectors since the program's earliest stages. Looking ahead, Ph.D. student Natalie Williams is already progressing work on calculations to further refine and calibrate the new models.

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Gravitational waves may reveal nature of dark matter

Observations of gravitational waves from merging black holes may reveal new insights about dark matter, suggests a new study from a UCL-led international team.

The study, presented at the 2023 National Astronomy Meeting in Cardiff and now published in the journal Physical Review D, used computer simulations to study the production of gravitational wave signals in simulated universes with different kinds of dark matter.

Their findings show that counting the number of black-hole merging events detected by the next generation of observatories could tell us whether or not dark matter interacts with other particles and therefore help pin down what it is made of.

Cosmologists generally regard dark matter as one of the biggest missing pieces in our understanding of the cosmos. Despite strong evidence that dark matter makes up 85% of all the matter in the Universe, there is currently no consensus on its underlying nature. This includes questions such as whether dark matter particles can collide with other particles such as atoms or neutrinos, or whether they pass straight through them unaffected.

A way to test this is by looking at how galaxies form in dense clouds of dark matter called haloes. If dark matter collides with neutrinos, the dark matter structure becomes dispersed, resulting in fewer galaxies being formed.

The problem with this method is that any galaxies that go missing are very small and very distant from us, so it's hard to see whether they are there or not, even with the best telescopes available.

Rather than targeting the missing galaxies directly, the authors of this study propose using gravitational waves as an indirect measure of their abundance. Their simulations show that in models where dark matter does collide with other particles, there are significantly fewer black-hole mergers in the distant universe.

While this effect is too small to be seen by current gravitational wave experiments, it will be a prime target for the next generation of observatories that are currently being planned.

The authors hope their methods will help stimulate new ideas for using gravitational wave data to explore the large-scale structure of the Universe, and shine a new light on the mysterious nature of dark matter.

Dr Alex Jenkins (UCL Physics & Astronomy), one of the lead authors of the study, said: "Gravitational waves are a powerful new tool for observing the distant Universe. The next generation of observatories will detect hundreds of thousands of black-hole mergers every year, giving us unprecedented insights into the structure and evolution of the cosmos."Co-author Dr Sownak Bose of Durham University said: "Dark matter remains one of the enduring mysteries in our understanding of the Universe.

This means it is especially important to continue identifying new ways to explore models of dark matter, combining both existing and new probes to test model predictions to the fullest. Gravitational-wave astronomy offers a pathway to better understand not just dark matter, but the formation and evolution of galaxies more generally."

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