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A bus-load of PPCUG members and friends visited the Gin Gin Gravitational Centre this May, and they certainly enjoyed this jam-packed, cheery educational wonderland in the bush. Not bad, away out there between GinGin and the coast, with friendly staff, interactive displays, and great facilities including the café section.
The Australian International Gravitational Observatory (AIGO) is still under construction on the grounds there, well away from heavy road and air traffic. While there, we learned that it is in partnership with five other gravitational observatories around the world (GEO and VIRGO in Europe, TAMA in Japan, and two Laser Interferometer Gravitationalwave Observatories in U.S.A.). They are all working together to perfect gravitational astronomy.
The faint and mysterious gravitational signals were predicted by Einstein last century, as elusive distortions of space-time in General Relativity Theory. If they are proved to exist, finding them will give the world a “telescope� that can peer into the far reaches of our universe. It will be “seeing� very faint radiation with an extremely long wave length. In effect it will be a time-machine that can see an unimaginable distance back towards the theorised “Big Bang�. (This link http://www.ligo.org/pdf_public/cadonati.pdf explains it more accurately than I can.)
As I understand it, the Einstein@Home project is dedicated to helping with the calculations needed to isolate signs of passing gravity waves from the never-ending noise from all quarters of outer space.
Enormous computational work is needed simply to sort out the wheat from the chaff, the theorised gravitational waves from the background static. Einstein@Home project harnesses the power of thousands of computers around the world. Their owners donate idle time through installing a 22MB programme which quietly works away in the background on snippets of work for this major task.
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