[ExI] Gravitational Waves Detected By LIGO!
John Clark
johnkclark at gmail.com
Fri Feb 12 21:38:03 UTC 2016
On Fri, Feb 12, 2016 at 10:28 AM, Tomaz Kristan <protokol2020 at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
>> >
>> The strain produced by the waves decays with 1/r. Tidal forces are
>> proportional to 1/r^3 so they decay very fast as you move away from the
>> source.
>
>
> >
> It's then either G-wave originated 10^9 ly away, or some tidal effect 10^3
> ly away. Like a neutron star inner collapse to a black hole, for example.
>
> Those two are indistinguishable for LIGO, I presume
> .
>
>
One way LIGO can distinguish a gravitational wave from other sources of
distortion of the mirrors is that if it's a
gravitational
wave then as one leg of the L shaped LIGO
detector
shrinks the other must expand
by the same amount; and if it were caused by tidal forces something would
have to be circling the Earth 250 times a second. And
nothing can be in orbit around the
Earth like that.
John K Clark
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