Method to support gravity wave detection

Professor Tsvi Piran, who works at the Hebrew University, Israel, has discovered a method that can aid in the detection of gravity waves.

Einstein was writing about gravity waves and we are still looking for them.Gravity waves are small ripples in the structure of space, the time that many people consider them to be the sounds of the universe.

Just like the sounds that complement the images in our daily lives, gravity waves will complement our view of the universe, like those captured by standard telescopes.

Albert Einstein predicted gravitational waves in 1918. Today, nearly 100 years later, advanced gravitational wave detectors are being built in the US, Europe, Japan and Australia to search. While any motion also produces gravitational waves, a signal large enough to be detected requires a mass movement of great velocity. The main candidate source is the joint venture of two neutron stars: two neutron stars have a mass equivalent to the mass of our sun, moving in a spiral pattern around each other and combined with speed. close to the speed of light.

Such events are rare and occur only once every hundred thousand years in every galaxy. Therefore, to detect a signal in our short life, the detectors must have enough sensitivity to detect signals emitted at distances of more than a billion light-years from Earth. . This poses a major technological challenge. At such distances, gravity waves will be like the sound of a faint knock on our door, while a television is turned on and the phone rings at the same time.

Compete noise from a variety of sources, ranging from seismic noise created by tiny earthquakes or even by ocean waves in distant places. How can we know that we have detected gravity waves from space rather than from a tree being cut down or from a truck running on the road?

Therefore, astronomers are looking for potential electromagnetic light signals that will accompany or follow gravity waves. This signal will allow us to "see through the hole" after hearing the weak knock on the door, and check if there is indeed "someone" appearing.

The results of this study were published in Nature by Professor Tsvi Piran, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel and co-author Dr. Ehud Nakar from Tel Aviv University.

They found that the surrounding matter between stars would slow the fragments that bounced off at speeds close to the speed of light in a joint venture linking two neutron stars. The heat generated in this process will radiate like radio waves. The spread of this heat will last for a few months and will be recognized by current radio telescopes at a distance of 1 billion light-years.

Searching for such a radio signal also follows a future discovery, or even detects a gravity wave probe. However, even before advanced gravity detectors were operational, it is expected that astronomers are designing devices geared toward finding unique signaling lights in 2015. this.

Nakar and Piran point out in their article that a transient, unidentified radio wave was observed in 1987 by Bower et al., Having all the characteristics of heat radiating like radio waves. and may have actually discovered for the first time the merging of two neutron stars in this way.

Dr. Nakar's research is supported by the International Reintegration Fund from the European Union and from the Israel Science Foundation and an Alon scholarship. Professor Piran's research is supported by an advanced European Research Council and the High Energy Astrophysics Center of the Israel Science Foundation.