Spread gravitational waves Through matter can detect the ripples in space-time caused by the great explosion.
Two plasma physicists have used the propagation of electromagnetic waves through plasma as an analogue to gravitational waves, and created a set of equations that describe what to look for when gravitational waves travel through stars and gases in the depths of space.
These signs could reveal elusive gravitational waves traveling through space beyond our narrow ability to detect them — the giant, low-frequency waves produced by a massive collision. black holesthe smaller resonance caused by the orbiting of white dwarf binaries, and the colossal resonance of the expansion of the universe, only fractions of a second after the Big Bang.
“We can’t see the early universe directly, but maybe we can see it indirectly if we look at how gravitational waves from that time affect the matter and radiation we can observe today.” says physicist Deepin Garg from Princeton University.
The gravitational waves that emerged from the collision between two stellar-mass black holes were the first discovered by humans in 2015Across a distance of 1.4 billion light years. Einstein first predicted that gravitational waves are a kind of ripple in a pond: space-time itself stretches and contracts from the gravitational perturbation caused by a massive event.
Thus, the instrument that detected these waves was not a telescope, but a precise array of lasers and mirrors that interact with the warping of space-time, producing a pattern that scientists can decipher to characterize the source of the gravitational waves. But the technology is limited: currently, we are only able to detect gravitational waves in the stellar cluster- Black hole And neutron star collision system.
Other sources of gravitational waves multi-denominational, but for now – and perhaps only – out of reach. But Garg and his colleague, physicist Ilya Dodin of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, realized in the course of their research on plasma fusion that there might be another way to see these currently hidden waves.
Plasma fusion may one day be an alternative, clean source of energy to power the world, but it still has a long way to go. One thing scientists need is a detailed model that describes the way electromagnetic waves travel through plasma. And it turns out that it must be very similar to the way gravitational waves move through matter.
“We put plasma wave machines to work on a gravitational wave problem,” Garg explains.
According to the pair’s work, the propagation of gravitational waves through matter should produce a detectable signal—changes, for example, in the light produced by stars, or in the enormous clouds of gas in the interstellar voids.
This could not only detect gravitational waves that currently exceed our detection capabilities, but also give scientists a new tool for studying stars. For example, the properties of the light signal generated by gravitational waves in stars can change based on the internal structure and density of the star.
Because it’s so hard to see the inner tricks of stars, gravitational waves could be a powerful new tool in this field of astronomy’s arsenal. The team’s work could also be useful for gravitational-wave events that we can detect: the mergers of stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars.
In other words, the pair seem to have outlined what could prove to be a new multifunctional and indispensable way of understanding the universe. The next step, they say, you’ll use it to try and analyze some actual data.
“I thought this would be a small six-month project for a graduate student that would involve solving a simple command,” Dodin says. “But once we started to delve deeper into the topic, we realized that very little was understood about the problem and we could do some basic theoretical work here.”
Research published in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.