Your daily sense of scale- gravitational wave edition

[guitar_villain]

A little over a billion years ago, two black holes that were orbiting each other coalesced into one.  One was 36 times the mass of the Sun, the other 29.  Towards the end they were orbiting each other 250 times a second, moving well over half the speed of light.

When they merged, they converted 3 solar masses of black hole into energy in the form of gravitational waves in less than a second.  (E=mc^2, Einstein's famous equation)  Hiroshima was destroyed when a paper-clip's worth of mass was converted.  While they were merging, they were putting out more power than every star in the entire universe combined.

A billion+ years later, those gravitational waves passed through Earth, distorting space around us.  The total change rhythmically moved a set of mirrors in the LIGO detectors roughly 4/1000's the diameter of a proton, or roughly 0.000000000000000004 meters.  (I think I counted the zeros right).  That was more than enough for both detectors to sense the change.   And if you're curious, merging black holes ring roughly at middle C. 

This was the final proof of a theory thought up by a couple of pounds of grey jello on top of an unassuming middle-aged German Jew named Albert Einstein.

I find it important to realize the scale of things around me at times and be astonished we can understand any of it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/ligo-gravitational-waves-black-holes-einstein.html

And for the hardcore, here's the actual paper.  It's actually somewhat readable

https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-P150914/public

[happy atheist]

My kids are really excited about this.

[laPapessaGiovanna]

It is so exciting!

Where are the young earth creationists? 

@CyborgKin What do you think they will manage to come up with? 

[formergothardite]

What will the young earth creationists say? Was the first thought that popped into my mind. Give them time and they will come up with something.

This sort of stuff is way more amazing and interesting than the creationism I was raised to believe. 

[guitar_villain]

2 hours ago, formergothardite said:

What will the young earth creationists say? Was the first thought that popped into my mind. Give them time and they will come up with something.

This sort of stuff is way more amazing and interesting than the creationism I was raised to believe. 

That's what I find most sad about fundamentalists.  Their world view doesn't allow for things like this since they are stuck with a 6k year old earth and a universe centered on people.  They can't feel the sense of utter awe I do at the scale of the universe and all the neat things in it.

When the only awesome thing you're allowed is Jesus your imagination becomes so stunted.

[CyborgKin]

Quote

"That last LinkedIn request set a new record for the most energetic physical event ever observed. Maybe we should respond."

"Nah."

http://xkcd.com/1642/

6 hours ago, laPapessaGiovanna said:

It is so exciting!

Where are the young earth creationists? 

@CyborgKin What do you think they will manage to come up with? 

I don't think this is anything especially new for the YEC crowd. Gravitational wave travel time is about the same problem as light travel time, and that's a problem they've been working on for a long time (pun not intended).

One hypothesis I've seen is that during the creation week, the rate of time slowed down (by a very large factor) on Earth (or rather, the general vicinity of Earth) compared to the rest of the universe.  That would allow the light to arrive on the Earth in time to be seen right away.  I'm unclear on the details since it involved a lot of astrophysics and relativity.

Here's an article from nearly 11 years ago which discusses some creationist cosmological models.  There's been more since then, but it gives a taste of the concepts involved.  http://creation.com/galactocentric-cosmology

Here's a slightly newer one about time dilation and achronicity. http://creation.com/new-time-dilation-helps-creation-cosmology

Ah, I found the bit describing the idea I mentioned above: (spoilered for long length)

Spoiler

 

Quote

In this section I outline a speculative light transit-time scenario during Day 4. Other scenarios are possible, so you should take this as only anexample of the possibilities that achronicity opens up.

Figure 7. Rising critical potential level makes achronous region expand with velocity vt.

Imagine that events prior to Day 4 have expanded space and moved the shell of ‘waters above the heavens’ out to a radius of, say, one billion light-years.28 Say that this has left the earth and the nearly-flat fabric of space within the waters just above the critical potential.

Now imagine that during the fourth day, God creates star masses in a way that would create a linearly-dented perturbation29 in the otherwise flat potential of the fabric of space, as shown in figure 7. There appear to be several ways to make such a shape.30But the linear shape is not essential. It only makes illustrating the processes simpler.

As in figure 5, the horizontal dashed line in figure 7 represents the critical potential, Φc. As soon as God creates the galaxy masses, the fabric of space begins sinking slowly, and the central part—containing the earth—will drop below the critical potential. An observer in ordinary space a bit farther from the centre would see a black sphere appear around the centre and begin growing in size. According to eq. (8), the entire interior of the sphere is an achronous region. For slow-moving objects in that region, time would be stopped.

The critical potential Φc depends on the speed of light, which in turn depends on the tension in the fabric of space (see Appendix). If, as God stretches out the fabric of space (e.g. Isaiah 40:22), He changes the tension simultaneously everywhere, then c will change, and the position of the critical potential with respect to the fabric will also change. (The potential difference ½ c2 is anchored to the Φ = 0 axis.) Thus the critical potential line in figure 7 could move up or down quite rapidly.

Let’s suppose the tension in the fabric of space suddenly decreases enough to make the critical potential move upward rapidly. Then sphere of timelessness will expand faster than otherwise. The speed vt of its expansion (or later, contraction) will depend on three factors: the (inverse of the) radial slope of the potential of the fabric of space (∂Φ/∂r), the rate of the potential’s descent or rise (∂Φ/∂t), and the rate of rise or descent (∂Φc/∂t) of the critical potential level:

these factors being evaluated at the location of the surface. For general potential shapes, let’s say that God designs or adjusts these three factors so that the expansion speed vt of the timeless zone surface is exactly c continuously. (Because the surface of the achronous zone is not a material object, its speed is not limited.) For ∂Φ/∂r constant with radius r, the other two factors can be constant in time to get a constant vt. For vt = c, the timeless zone will follow closely behind the wave of galaxy creation, also proceeding outward at the speed of light. As the zone reaches and engulfs each new galaxy, time stops for it.

When the wave of creation stops, say at the location of the waters above, suppose that God now increases the tension, and the critical potential line moves downward. As it does so, the radius of the sphere of timelessness will decrease. Again, let’s imagine that God sets the values of the three factors in eq. (24) to give a contraction speed of –c. As each galaxy emerges from the receding timeless zone, it resumes emitting light. Some of the emitted light will be going inward toward the centre. Because the timeless sphere is moving inward at the speed of light, the inbound light will follow right behind the sphere as it shrinks. When the sphere reaches zero radius and disappears, the Earth emerges, and immediately the light that has been following the sphere will reach earth, even light that started billions of light years away. The stretching of the fabric of space has been occurring continuously all along the light trajectory, thus red-shifting the light wavelengths according to eq. (21).

On Earth, it is still only the fourth day. An observer on the night side of the earth would see a black sky one instant, and a sky filled with stars the next instant. With a telescope he would be able to see distant galaxies having suitably red-shifted spectra.

 

 

You follow all that?

Here's a more recent article: http://creation.com/tension-not-extension-in-creation-cosmology

Anyhow, my point is that I don't think gravity waves post a specific new challenge that they're not already dealing with in regards to light travel time.

But on the topic of gravity waves, here's a couple of articles from last year mentioning them:

http://creation.com/big-bang-smoking-gun

http://creation.com/detection-of-cosmic-inflation-wrong

A couple of quotes:

Quote

Not only is the claim that inflation has been detected, but also that they have discovered the effects of gravitational waves associated with the initial big bang. They claim they see the ensemble effect of primordial gravitational waves on the CMB photons. This is based on their modelling of what power should be expected in certain CMB fluctuations imprinted by gravitational waves from the big bang.

Gravitational waves, a prediction of Einstein’s General Relativity theory, so far have not been detected with the very large earth-based interferometric detectors like LIGO. This current claim is that they have detected the signal of these inflationary gravitational waves in the B-mode power spectrum around l ~ 80 (l is a measure of the multipole expansion term used to quantify the power in the CMB radiation on different angular scales across the sky).

Quote

The universe began as God said in Genesis chapter 1, with no big bang. He created it out of nothing, by His supernatural omnipotence. God said: “Let there be light.” He filled the universe with light and that light might be what we observe today in the CMB radiation. My own cosmology—a derivative of Moshe Carmeli’s own big bang cosmology, but with biblical initial conditions—has a period of super-rapid accelerating expansion in the 4th Day of Creation, not quite the same as inflation, yet sufficient to adiabatically cool the initial light from a temperature of about 9,000K to nearly 3K today.

I proposed that the initial light was due to plasma glowing blue, which filled the initial much smaller universe. That initial plasma would have had sound waves resonating through it. And gravitational waves are entirely possible real physics, though they have yet to be shown to exist. Even the case of the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar-neutron star pair, the discovery for which they were given the Nobel Prize in 1993 (where energy is lost as the binary pair spiral in towards each other), shows only that gravitational energy is lost, not that that gravitational energy is dissipated in waves.

My point is that even if this detection of an anisotropy in the excess B-mode polarization of the CMB photon field at the claimed angular scales is confirmed it may not be evidence of anything more than an effect resulting from some other source in the universe. You would have to rule out all other causes before you could definitely say it was a detection of the big bang. But to do that you would have to know everything and that would make you a god.

I don't think they'll mind too much that they have now.  But if they do post a new article regarding the gravity wave detection, I'll be sure to post it here!  Thanks for the ping

BTW, the articles I linked are all by the same fellow http://creation.com/dr-john-hartnett-cv . There's at least a few other creationists in this field, each with their own hypotheses.  One old idea involved a faster speed of light in the past, but that one's been thoroughly discarded as completely unworkable.

2 hours ago, guitar_villain said:

That's what I find most sad about fundamentalists.  Their world view doesn't allow for things like this since they are stuck with a 6k year old earth and a universe centered on people.  They can't feel the sense of utter awe I do at the scale of the universe and all the neat things in it.

When the only awesome thing you're allowed is Jesus your imagination becomes so stunted.

Not all of them are like that. Here's an interview with a creationist NASA aerospace engineer:

http://creation.com/exploring-the-heavens-michael-tigges-nasa-interview

Quote

‘I recall watching the first lunar landing with total fascination; and perceive now how that event provided a degree of motivation for me to seek a career investigating outer space. My career at NASA began just prior to the first Space Shuttle launch, so my first-hand recollection of the Apollo era was through television and radio.’

‘The heavens declare God’s glory in all ways. In all ways! From the moment I peered up into space as a child, I sensed the presence of God. When I see a Hubble Space Telescope image I react with fear and awe. Every mathematical equation I write to predict the path of space vehicles illuminates the miracle of precision designed into our world. Every Space Shuttle launch, I marvel at the ingenuity granted to man by God to accomplish that feat.

‘I am struck with awe by the incomprehensible scale of the galaxies and the power of that creation, and then humbled by my personal value to God, who sent His son to die for my sin.’

 

[formergothardite]

A lot of people do feel awe and amazement that "God" did everything in a short time. To me personally the awe I felt when I was a young earth creationists isn't anything compared to the awe and amazement I feel now that I'm not. It is just so fascinating to me to sit and think about all that has happened to create the world as we know it.  

[CyborgKin]

And here it is:

http://creation.com/detection-of-gravitational-waves-and-biblical-creation