Will we get to know a successful detection immediately?

Christian Hoklas
Christian Hoklas
Joined: 9 Feb 05
Posts: 11
Credit: 366364
RAC: 0
Topic 191489

Hey everybody,

at the moment we are crunching through the data of the S5-run, which is meant to be at design sensitivity. If a sign of a gravitational wave is detected by the client, what is going to happen? How long will it take till we (the crunchers) will get to know about such a success? Will there be an announcement after a few days/weeks or will there be a report on S5 only after the run is completed?

Could not find anything on that topic!

Regards,
Christian

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
Moderator
Joined: 1 Dec 05
Posts: 6534
Credit: 284730859
RAC: 105773

Will we get to know a successful detection immediately?

Quote:

Hey everybody,

at the moment we are crunching through the data of the S5-run, which is meant to be at design sensitivity. If a sign of a gravitational wave is detected by the client, what is going to happen?


A single WU is not going to do that. The detection will be inferred from several of them, and thus from several clients in all likelihood. Some things that I hope I have correctly inferred about E@H/LIGO are as follows:
- the detectors ie. really big interferometers are a new venture.
- an opinion about the confidence of a detection is formed from examination of a 'signal' vs a 'background'.
- the signal is hopefully some astronomical event.
- the background are any other reasons for the interferometers to emit a value into the data pipe.
- a subset of the E@H crunching boxes will actually do the math on data obtained from time periods when gravity waves from sought events were actually flowing through the detectors.
- we still need, for comparison, the data when gravity waves from events of interest were not influencing the detectors.
- there is alot of work in the above. All of us volunteers are crucial to giving a confident answer to the science questions.
It is still cool to think that one's own box might contain a 'wiggle of spacetime'. I hope mine does! But in reality detections will be owned by us all.

Quote:
How long will it take till we (the crunchers) will get to know about such a success? Will there be an announcement after a few days/weeks or will there be a report on S5 only after the run is completed?


That would happen according to the policy ( already in place ) of the LIGO collaboration. We at E@H are a very valuable component in the pipeline of analysis for that enterprise.

Quote:
Could not find anything on that topic!


Try this link ( from the top right corner of the E@H homepage ), this also, and in particular this.
Also take some time to glance at the detector logs for Hanford and Livingstone. Enter username 'reader' with password 'readonly' to view. It will reveal the flavour of the sheer blizzard of factors to be considered in gaining the best possible data for our analysis here at E@H. The science teams are working real hard to yield that - which is the main reason we don't hear from them as frequently as some of us would prefer.
Cheers, Mike.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.