Some clarification request...
14 Sep 2011 14:39:29 UTC
Topic 195969
(moderation:
Hello there,
I have not been using BOINC for a while and I am little puzzled as to what the Einstein@Home project is currently trying to do... Wasn't there originally talk about using laser inferometers to prove gravitations waves and find black holes with a certain spin?
Of course I am willing to donate clock cycles to astronomy projects, but... searching radio telescope data for pulsars is a little unspectacular in comparison, isn't it? Why is it so important to find these pulsars and what can they be used for? Is there anything the projects hopes to prove or falsify with this data?
Thanks for clarifications.
Some clarification request...
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I believe that the laser interferometers are being upgraded so they are not working. Einstein@home is giving us something else to do.
Tullio
Welcome to E@H! :-) E@H is
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Welcome to E@H! :-)
E@H is part of a data processing pipeline for a portion of the scientific collaboration called LIGO. It has a multi-decade timeline for development and operation of instruments to detect gravitational waves. The larger interferometers are presently being upgraded to more sensitive versions ( including lessons based upon experience with prior setups ). We haven't to date found any gravitational wave sources, but have put upper bounds upon the strength and type of many astronomical models of sources though.
Our fearless leader - Prof Bruce Allen - predicted a hiatus in our GW workload about now, and thus was fortunately able to hook us up to process data for a related problem area : analysis of radio-telescope signals. So this is electromagnetic waves, not gravitational waves, however from more or less the same objects and systems we expect to discover as GW sources. Even more recently we have been hooked into a data stream from the Fermi satellite which is trying to find gamma-ray pulsars : again electromagnetic detections but also from the same herd of beasts.
There is still ongoing GW work being done here at E@H - indeed we have to do some as E@H receives public funding on that basis - of about half our Teraflop capacity. The work units are using ( even trialling ) different techniques on existing data sets from when the larger interferometers were up and running. Note that the GEO and Virgo detectors are taking data at present while others are down for upgrades.
The basic technical issue is that any gravitational wave is going to be very subtle and difficult to confirm an absolute detection of. The magnitude of the expected measurable effects is of order 1 part in 24 powers of ten ( 1 million billion billion ). The interferometers are using light to measure spacetime and thus find alterations/warpage from distant astronomical events. Shortly after Einstein published his general theory of relativity ( roughly Newtonian gravity with time delays and mass/energy equivalence ), someone I've forgotten solved the equations to deduce the existence of gravitational waves. Einstein himself confirmed that theoretical result but despaired of any experimental confirmation because of the incredible softness of the effect.
Hence we live in hope, but certainly have to be very patient indeed. :-) :-)
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
On theregister.co.uk I found
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On theregister.co.uk I found a note about work done in Australia on "squeezing" laser radiation in order to minimize quantum fluctuations. Since it was not very clear, I did not link it. I see the same argument in the GEO600 site. It is not clear if it refers to work done in Hannover or in Australia.
Tullio
I wonder if it is even
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I wonder if it is even possible to prove that on earth... It would be a lot easier on Mars or Moon, tectonic dead, no drifting continental plates, no atmosphere, no life, no tides, no traffic - just sunwind at day and a meteorite now and then... just massive rocks in space. Unfortunately it's not quite around the corner and even if anyone would go there during the next three decades (which I doubt), and even if they would have inferometers to measure their landing site... the devices precise enough for this project.
It must be pretty frustrating to find something that might be a signal as well as a coincidental formation of random noise.
Sometimes I wonder how this funding works... why is it so much more important to find or neglect the Higgs Boson that CERN gets a particle accelerater or several billion euro cost... If that was invested into a supercomputer it could process more FLOPS than the entire BOINC network with a lot better energy efficiency. (Not that I find building particle accelerators a bad thing...)
But CERN is now using a BOINC
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But CERN is now using a BOINC project, LHC@home 2.0, since it has a huge mass of data to process. It is called Test4Theory@home and I am running it.
Tullio
Looks like they were in some
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Looks like they were in some testing phase.. I'll wait until the project is officially publically available.
RE: Looks like they were in
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It is in Beta Test phase but they are accepting new members in a waiting list. It has been running on my Linux box since November 2010 and is now running smoothly after a few upgrades.Developers are very helpful.
Tullio