Tag: Spectroscopy

Caged But Free

On By rolcottIn Astronomy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Afternoon coffee time. Cal waves a handful of astronomy magazines at us as Cathleen and I enter his shop. “Hey, guys, there’s a ton of black hole stuff in the news all of a sudden.”

Cathleen plucks a scone from the rack. “Not surprised, Cal. James Webb Space Telescope looks harder and deeper than we ever could before and my colleagues have been feasting on the data. Black holes are highly energetic so the most extreme ones show up well. The Hubble and JWST folks find new extremes every week.”

Cal would be disappointed if I didn’t ask. “So what’s the new stuff in there?”

<flipping through the magazines> “This seems to be quasar jet month. We’ve got a new champion jet and this article says M87’s quasar makes novas.”

“Remind me, Cathleen, what’s a quasar?”

“A quasi‑stellar object, Sy, except we now know it’s a galaxy with a supermassive black hole—”

“I thought they all had super‑massives.”

“Most do, but these guys are special. For reasons researchers are still arguing about, they emit enormous amounts of energy, as much as a trillion average stars. Quasar luminosity is more‑or‑less flat all across the spectrum from X-rays down as low as we can measure. Which isn’t easy, because the things are so far away that Universe expansion has stretched their waves by z‑factors of 6 or 8 or more. We see their X‑ray emissions in the infrared range, which is why JWST’s optimized for infrared.”

“What does ‘flat’ tell you?”

“Sy’d give a better answer than I would. Sy?”

“Fun fact, Cal. Neither atoms nor the Sun have flat spectra and for the same reason: confinement. Electromagnetic waves come from jiggling charges, right? In an atom the electron charge clouds are confined to specific patterns centered on the nucleus. Each pattern holds a certain amount of energy. The atom can only move to a different charge pattern by emitting or absorbing a wave whose energy matches the difference between the pattern it’s in and some alternate pattern. Atomic and molecular spectra show peaks at the energies where those transitions happen.”

“But the Sun doesn’t have those patterns.”

“Not in the stepped energy‑difference sense. The Sun’s made of plasma, free electrons and nuclei all bouncing off each other, moving wherever but confined to the Sun’s spherical shape by gravity. Any particle that’s much more or less energetic than the local average eventually gets closer to average by exchanging energy with its neighbors. Free charged particles radiate over a continuous, not stepwise, spectrum of energies. The free‑particle combined spectrum has a single peak that depends on the average temperature. You only get flat spectra from systems that aren’t confined either way.”

“What I get from all that is a jet’s flat spectrum says that its electrons or whatever aren’t confined. But they must be — the things are thin as a pencil for thousands of lightyears. Something’s gotta be holding them together but why no peaks?”

“Excellent question, Cal. By the way, jets can be even longer than you said. I’ve read about your champion jet. It extends 23 million lightyears, more than a hundred times the width of the Milky Way galaxy. Straight as a string, no kinks or wiggles during a billion years of growth. I think what’s going on is that the charged particles are confined side‑to‑side somehow but they’re free to roam along the jet’s axis. If that’s the case, the flat‑spectrum light ought to be polarized. I’m sure someone is working on that test now. Your thoughts, Sy?”

“As a physicist I’m interested in the ‘somehow.’ We only know of four forces. The distances are too big for weak and strong nuclear forces. Gravity’s out, too, because it acts equally in all directions, not just crosswise to the axis. That leaves electromagnetic fields in some super‑strong self‑reinforcing configuration. The particles must be spiraling like mad about that central axis. I’ll bet that explains Cal’s quasar galaxy concentrating novae close to its SMBH jet axis. A field that strong could generate enough interference to wreak havoc on an unstable star’s plasma.”

Hubble’s view of the M87 galaxy and jet
Credit NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

~ Rich Olcott

Zoning Out over Jupiter

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Planetary Science, Mathematics: Spherical Harmonics, Physics: Waves, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I’m nursing my usual mug of eye‑opener in Cal’s Coffee Shop when astronomer Cathleen and chemist Susan chatter in. “Morning, ladies. Cathleen, prepare to be even more smug.”

“Ooo, what should I be smug about?”

“Your Jupiter suggestion. Grab some coffee and a couple of chairs.” <screen‑tapping on Old Reliable> “Ready? First step — purple and violet. You’ll never see violet or purple light coming from a standard video screen.”

“He’s going spectrum‑y on us, right, Cathleen?”

“More like anti‑spectrum‑y, Susan. Purple light doesn’t exist in the spectrum. We only perceive that color when we see red mixed with blue like that second band on Sy’s display. Violet light is a thing in nature, we can see it in flowers and dyes and rainbows beyond blue. Standard screens can’t show violet because their LEDs just emit red, blue and green wavelengths. Old Reliable uses mixtures of those three to fake all its colors. Where are you going with this, Sy?””

“Deeper into Physics. Cast your eyes upon the squiggles to the right. The one in the middle represents the lightwave coming from purple‑in‑the‑middle. The waveform’s jaggedy, but if you compare peaks and troughs you can see its shape is the sum of the red and blue shapes. I scaled the graphs up from 700 nanometers for red and 450 for blue.”

“Straightforward spectroscopy, Sy, Fourier analysis of a complicated linear waveform. Some astronomers make their living using that principle. So do audio engineers and lots of other people.”

“Patience, Cathleen, I’m going beyond linear. Fourier’s work applies to variation along a line. Legendre and Poisson extended the analysis to—”

“Aah, spherical harmonics! I remember them from Physical Chemistry class. They’re what gives shapes to atoms. They’ve got electron shells arranged around the nucleus. Electron charge stays as close to the nucleus as quantum will let it. Atoms absorb light energy by moving charge away from there. If the atom’s in a magnetic field or near other atoms that gives it a z-axis direction then the shells split into wavey lumps going to the poles and different directions and that’s your p-, d– and f-orbitals. Bigger shells have more room and they make weird forms but only the transition metals care about that.”

The angular portion of the lowest-energy spherical harmonics
Credit: Inigo.quilez, under CCA SA 3.0 license
Adapted from Wieczorek and Meschede under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

“Considering you left out all the math, Susan, that’s a reasonable summary. I prefer to think of spherical harmonics as combinations of wave shapes at right angles. Imagine a spherical blob of water floating in space. If you tap it on top, waves ripple down to the bottom and back up again and maybe back down again. Those are zonal waves. A zonal harmonic averages over all E‑W longitudes at each N‑S latitude. Or you could stroke the blob on the side and set up a sectorial wave pattern that averages latitudes.”

“How about center‑out radial waves?”

“Susan’s shells do that job. My point was going to be that what sine waves do for characterizing linear things like sound and light, spherical harmonics do for central‑force systems. We describe charge in atoms, yes, but also sound coming from an explosion, heat circulating in a star, gravity shaping a planet. Specifically, Jupiter. Kaspi’s paper you gave me, Cathleen, I read it all the way to the Results table at the tail end. That was the rabbit‑hole.”

“Oh? What’s in the table?”

“Jupiter’s zonal harmonics — J‑names in the first column, J‑intensities in the second. Jn‘s shape resembles a sine wave and has n zeroes. Jupiter’s never‑zero central field is J0. Jn increases or decreases J0‘s strength wherever it’s non‑zero. For Jupiter that’s mostly by parts per million. What’s cool is the pattern you see when you total the dominating Jeven contributions.”

Data from Kaspi, et al.

Cathleen’s squinting in thought. “Hmm… green zone A would be excess gravity from Jupiter’s equatorial bulge. B‘s excess is right where Kaspi proposed the heavy downflow. Ah‑HAH! C‘s pink deficit zone’s right on top of the Great Red Spot’s buoyant updraft. Perfect! Okay, I’m smug.”

~ Rich Olcott

To See Beneath The Starlight

On By rolcottIn Astronomy, James Webb Space Telescope, UncategorizedLeave a comment

C‑J casts an image to Al’s video screen. “This is new news, just came out a couple of weeks ago. It’s the lead figure from NASA’s announcement of JWST’s first exoplanet examination. We’re picked this study because the scientists used the transit technique. I’ve added the orange stuff so we can make a point. Each blue dot is one measurement from JWST’s Near‑Infrared Spectrograph while it looked at a star named LHS 457. Even though the telescope is outside Earth’s atmosphere and operating at frigid temperatures, you can see that the numbers scatter. Surely the star’s light isn’t changing that quickly – the dots are about 9 seconds apart – the spread has to come from noise in JWST’s electronics.”

Adapted from image by NASA Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, L. Hustak (STScI).

“We’re just partway through our statistics class but we know to expect 95% of noise to be within 2 standard deviations either way of the average. With about 400 dots per hour, C‑J drew his lines to put about 10 dots per hour each above and below.”

“Right, Madison, and the point we want to make is how small that range is. Only about 0.04% difference. That’s like one drop in a 2500‑drop titration. Professor Kim’s samples in our Chem lab generally take around 20 milliliters which is about 400 drops.”

“So anyway, look at that dip in the light curve. That’s way out of the noise range. The starlight really did dim, even though it wasn’t by much.”

“By the way, NASA’s press release is a little misleading and in fact missed the point of the research. JWST didn’t find this exoplanet, the TESS satellite system did. JWST looked where TESS said to and yup, there it was. This report was really about what JWST could tell us about the exoplanet’s atmosphere.”

“There’s a bunch of possibilities that the researchers can now eliminate. C‑J, please cast the next slide to the screen. We need to be clear, this isn’t the spectrum that JWST recorded during a transit.”

Adapted from image by NASA (Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, L. Hustak (STScI)), and Figure 2 in Lustig-Yeager, et al.

“No, that would have been simply the star’s light after some of it was filtered through the planet’s atmosphere. The researchers used a lot of computer time to subtract out the right amount of the star’s own spectrum. This is what’s left — their estimate of the spectrum of the planet’s atmosphere if it has one. I added the orange error bar on each point and for the sake of comparisons I traced in that dotted curve marked ‘Metallicity‘ from the scientists’ paper. The other lines are models for four possible atmospheres.”

“Why orange again? And why are the bars longer to the right of that gap?”

“I like orange. I had to trace the bars for this slide because NASA’s diagram used dark grey that doesn’t show up very well. The dots in the wavelength range beyond 3.8 microns are from a noisier sensor. Professor O’Meara, we need some help here. What’s metallicity and why did the paper’s authors think it’s important?”

“We haven’t touched on that topic in class yet. ‘Metallicity’ is the fraction of a star’s material made up of atoms heavier than hydrogen and helium. A star could have high metallicity either because it was born in a dust cloud loaded with carbons and oxygens, or maybe it’s old and has generated them from its own nuclear reactions. Either way, a planet in a high‑metallicity environment could have an atmosphere packed with molecules like O2, H2O, CH4 and CO2. That doesn’t seem to be the case here, does it?”

“No, ma’am. The measured points don’t have this model’s peaks or valleys. Considering the error bars, the transmission spectrum is pretty much flat. Most of the researchers’ other models also predict peaks that aren’t there. The best models are a tight cloud deck like Venus or Titan, or thin and mostly CO2 like Mars, or no atmosphere at all.”

“Even a null curve tells us more than we knew.”

~~ Rich Olcott

Useful Eccentricity

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Techniques, UncategorizedLeave a comment

“Hi, Al. What’s the hubbub in the back room?”

“Cathleen’s doing another astronomy class group seminar. This one’s about exoplanets. I’d like to listen in but I’ve got to tend the cash register here. Take notes, okay?”

“Sure, no problem.”

Professor Cathleen’s at the podium. “Okay, class, settle down. I hope everyone’s ready with their presentations. Maria, you’ve got a good topic to start us off.”

“Thank you. Everyone here knows I’ve been interested in spectroscopy since I was a student intern at Arecibo. It is such a powerful thing to know that a particular kind of atom, anywhere in the Universe, absorbs or gives off exactly the same pattern of light frequencies. Suppose you are looking at the spectrum of a star or a galaxy and you recognize a pattern, like sodium’s yellow doublet or hydrogen’s Lyman series. The pattern won’t be at its normal frequencies because of the Doppler effect. That’s good because the amount of blue‑shift or red‑shift tells us how quick the object is moving toward or away from us. That was how Dr Hubble proved that most other galaxies are flying away.”

<casts a slide to Al’s video screen> “I’ll begin with a review of some class material. The spectroscopy we see in the sky is light that was emitted at some peak wavelength lambda. Lambda with the little ‘o‘ is what we see for the same emission or absorption process in the laboratory. The wavelength difference between sky and laboratory is the absolute shift. Divide that by the laboratory wavelength to get the relative shift, the z‑scale. All the light from one object should have the same z value. It is important that z also gives us the object’s velocity if we multiply by the speed of light.”

<voice from the rear> “What’s the ‘fe ka‘ stuff about?”

“I was getting to that. Those two lines describe a doublet, a pair of peaks that always appear together. This is in the X‑ray spectrum of iron which is Fe for the chemists. K-alpha is a certain process inside the iron atom. Astronomers like to use that doublet because it’s easy to identify. Yes, profesora?”

“Two additional reasons, Maria. Iron’s normally the heaviest element in a star because stellar nuclear fusion processes don’t have enough energy to make anything heavier than that. Furthermore, although every element heavier than neon generates a K-alpha doublet, the peak‑to‑peak split increases with atomic mass. Iron’s doublet is the widest we see from a normal star.”

“Thank you. So, the arithmetic on the rest of the slide shows how Dr Hubble might have calculated the speed of a galaxy. But that’s steady motion. Exoplanets orbiting a star appear to speed ahead then fall behind the star, yes? We need to think about how a planet affects its star. This next slide talks about that. My example uses numbers for the Sun and Jupiter. We say Jupiter goes around the Sun, but really, they both go around their common center of gravity, their barycenter. You see how it’s calculated here — MP is the planet’s mass, MS is the star’s mass, dSP is the star-to-planet distance and dB is the distance from the star’s center to the barycenter. I’ve plugged in the numbers. The barycenter is actually ten thousand kilometers outside the Sun!”

“So you could say that our Sun counterbalances Jupiter by going in a tight circle around that point.”

“Exactly! For my third slide I worked out whether a distant astronomer could use Doppler logic to detect Sun‑Jupiter motion. The first few lines calculate the size of the Sun’s circle and than how fast the Sun flies around it. Each Jupiter year’s blue shift to red shift totals only 79 parts per billion. The Sun’s iron K‑alpha1 wavelength varies only between 193.9980015 and 193.9979985 picometers. This is far too small a change to measure, yes?”

<dramatic pause> “I summarize. To make a good Doppler signal, a star must have a massive exoplanet that’s close enough to push its star fast around the barycenter but far enough away to pull the barycenter outside of the star.”

“Thank you, Maria.”

“X” marks the barycenter

~~ Rich Olcott

Heavenly Messengers

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Multi-messenger, Astronomy: Techniques, Gravitational astronomy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

A gorgeous Fall day, a little bit cool-ish, perfect for a brisk walk in the park.  I’m striding along the lake-bound path when there’s a breathless shout behind me.  “Hey, Moire, wait up!  I got questions!”

“Hello, Mr Feder.  What’s the topic this time?  And keep up, please, I’ve got geese to watch.”

“I been reading in the business pages <puff, puff> about all the money different countries are putting into ‘multi-messenger astronomy.’  <puff>  What’s that about, anyway?  Who’s sending messages and ain’t the Internet good enough?”

“It’s not who, Mr Feder, it’s what — stars, galaxies, black holes, the Universe.  And the messages are generally either ‘Here I am‘ or ‘Something interesting just happened‘.  The Internet just doesn’t reach that far and besides, no kitten pictures.”

“Pretty simple-sounding messages, so why the big bucks for extra message-catchers?”

“Fair question.  It has to do with what kind of information each messenger carries.  Photons, for instance.”

“Yeah, light-waves, the rainbow.”

“Way more than the rainbow.  Equating light-waves to just the colors we see is like equating sound-waves to just the range from A4 through F4# on a piano.”

“Hey, that’s less than an octave.”

“Yup, and electromagnetism’s scale is hugely broader than that.  Most of the notes, or colors, are way out of our range.  A big tuba makes a deep, low-frequency note but a tiny piccolo makes a high note.  Photon characteristics also scale with the size of where they came from.  Roughly speaking, the shorter the light’s wave-length, the smaller the process it came out of and the smaller its target will be.  Visible light, for instance, is sent and received by loosely-held charge sloshing inside an atom or molecule.  Charge held tight to a nucleus gives rise to higher-energy photons, in the ultra-violet range or beyond.”

“Like how beyond?”

“X-rays can rip electrons right out of a molecule.  Gamma rays are even nastier and involve charge activity inside a nucleus, like during a nuclear reaction.”

“How about in the other direction?  Nothing?”

“Hardly.  Going that way is going to bigger scales.  Infra-red is about parts of molecules vibrating against each other, microwave is about whole molecules rotating.  When your size range gets out to feet-to-miles you’re looking at radio waves that probably originated from free electrons or ions slammed back and forth by electric or magnetic fields.”

“So these light ranges are like messengers that clue us in on what’s going on out there?  Different messengers, different kindsa clues?”

“You got the idea.  Add in that what happens to the light on the way here is also important.  Radio and microwave photons with their long wavelengths swerve around dust particles that block out shorter-wavelength ones.  Light that traversed Einstein-bent space lets us measure the masses of galaxies.  Absorption and polarization at specific wavelengths tell us what species are out there and what they’re doing.  Blue-shifts and red-shifts tell us how fast things are moving towards and away from us.  And of course, atmospheric distortions tell us we’ve got to put satellite observatories above the atmosphere to see better.”

“One messenger, lots of effects.”

“Indeed, but in the past few years we’ve added two more, really important messengers.  Photons are good, but they’re limited to just one of the four fundamental forces.”

“Hey, there’s gotta be more than that.  This is a complicated world.”

“True, but physicists can account for pretty much everything at the physical and chemical level with only four — electromagnetism, gravity, the strong force that holds nuclei together and the weak force that’s active in nuclear transformation processes.  Photons do electromagnetism and that’s all.”

“So you’re saying we’ve got a line on two of the others?”

“Exactly.  IceCube and its kin record the arrival of high-energy neutrinos.  In a sense they are to the weak force what photons are to electromagnetism.  We don’t know whether gravitation works through particles, but LIGO and company are sensitive to changes in the gravitational field that’s always with us.  Each gives us a new perspective on what’s happening out there.”

“So if you get a signal from one of the new messengers at the same time you get a photon signal…”

“Oh, look, the geese are coming in.”

Heavenly messengers

~~ Rich Olcott

Terzetto for Rubber Ruler

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Techniques, Cosmology, Physics: Electromagnetism, Physics: Fundamentals, Physics: Light and Relativity, UncategorizedLeave a comment

ruler and sodium lines“So you’re telling me, Cathleen, that you can tell how hot a star is by looking at its color?”

“That’s right, Vinnie.  For most stars their continuous spectrum is pretty close to the blackbody equation tying peak wavelength to temperature.”

“But you can’t do that with far-away stars, right, because the further they are, the more stretched-out their lightwaves get.  Won’t that mess up the peak wavelength?”

“The key is Kirchhoff’s other kinds of spectrum.”

“You’re talking the bright-line and dark-line kinds.”

“Exactly.  Each kind of spectrum comes from a different process — each is affected differently by the object in question and the environment it’s embedded in.  A continuous spectrum is all about charged particles moving randomly in response to the heat energy they’re surrounded by.  It doesn’t matter what kind of particles they are or even whether they’re positive or negative.  Whenever a particle changes direction, it twitches the electromagnetic field and gives off a wave.”

“Right — the higher the temperature the less time between twitches; the wave can’t move as far before things change so the wavelength’s shorter; any speed’s possible so you can turn that dial wherever; I got all that.  So what’s different with the bright-line and dark-line spectrums?”

Cathleen and I both blurt out, “Spectra!” at the same time and give each other a look.  We’re grown-ups now.  We don’t say, “Jinx!” to each other any more.

“Alright, spectra.  But how’re they different?”

I pick up the story.  “Like Cathleen said, continuous spectra from same–temperature stuff look identical no matter what kind of stuff’s involved because heat is motion and each particle moves as a unit  The other kinds of spectrum are about transitions within particles so they’re all about which kind of stuff.  A given kind of atom can only absorb certain wavelengths of light and it can only relax by giving off exactly the same wavelengths.  There’s no in-betweens.”

She cuts in.  “Sodium, for instance.  It has two strong lines in the yellow, at 588.995 and 589.592 nanometers.  Whether in a star or a meteor or fireworks, sodium gives off exactly those colors.  Conversely, in an interstellar cloud or in a star’s outermost layers sodium absorbs exactly those colors from any continuous-spectrum light passing through.”

I’m back in.  “And there’s the key to your unmixing question, Vinnie.  We’ve talked about frames, remember?  Your far-away star’s light-generating layers emit a continuous spectrum that describes its temperature.  If we were right next to it, that’s the spectrum we’d see.  But as you say, we’re a long way away and in our frame the light’s been stretched.  It still looks like the black-body curve but it’s red-shifted because of our relative motion.”

Cathleen’s turn.  “But if there are sodium atoms in the star’s upper layers, their absorptions will cut a pair of notches in that emitted spectrum.  It won’t be a smooth curve, there’ll be two sharp dips in it, close together, with the blue-side one twice as strong as the other one.  Easy to recognize and measure the redshift.  The blackbody peak is redshifted by exactly the same amount so with some arithmetic you’ve got the peak’s original wavelength and the star’s temperature.”

Mine.  “See, because we know what the sodium wavelengths were in the star’s frame, we can divide the dip wavelengths we measure by the rest-frame numbers we know about.  The ratios give us the star’s redshift.”

Spectrum with only blackbody and sodium Cathleen turns to her laptop and starts tapping keys.  “Let’s do an example.  Suppose we’re looking at a star’s broadband spectrogram.  The blackbody curve peaks at 720 picometers.  There’s an absorption doublet with just the right relative intensity profile in the near infra-red at 1,060,190 and 1,061,265 picometers.  They’re 1,075 picometers apart.  In the lab, the sodium doublet’s split by 597 picometers.  If the star’s absorption peaks are indeed the sodium doublet then the spectrum has been stretched by a factor of 1075/597=1.80.  Working backward, in the star’s frame its blackbody peak must be at 720/1.80=400 picometers, which corresponds to a temperature of about 6,500 K.”

“Old Reliable calculates from that stretch factor and the Hubble Constant the star’s about ten billion lightyears away and fleeing at 240,000 km/s.”

“All that from three peaks.  Spectroscopy’s pretty powerful, huh?”

Cathleen and me: “For sure!    Jinx!”

~~ Rich Olcott

aLIGO and eLISA: Tuning The Instrument

On By rolcottIn Astronomy: Techniques, Gravitational astronomy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Oh, it’s good to see Big News in hard science get big attention in Big Media.  The LIGO story and Columbia’s Dr Brian Greene even made it to the Stephen Colbert Late Show.  Everyone chuckled at the final “boowee-POP” audio recording (simulation at 7:30 into this clip; get for-real traces and audio from this one).

There’s some serious science in those chirps, not to mention serious trouble for any alien civilization that happened to be too close to the astronomical event giving rise to them.

LIGO trace 3
Adapted from the announcement paper by Abbot et al

The peaks and valleys in the top LIGO traces represent successive spatial compression cycles generated by two massive bodies orbiting each other.  There’s one trace for each of the two LIGO installations.  The spectrograms beneath show relative intensity at each frequency.  Peaks arrived more rapidly in the last 100 milliseconds and the simulated sound rose in pitch because the orbits grew smaller and faster.  The audio’s final POP is what you get from a brief but big disturbance, like the one you hear when you plug a speaker into a live sound system.  This POP announced two black holes merging into one, converting the mass-energy of three suns into a gravitational jolt to the Universe.

Scientists have mentioned in interviews that LIGO has given us “an ear to the Universe.”  That’s true in several different <ahem> senses.  First, we’ve seen in earlier posts that gravitational physics is completely different from the electromagnetism that illuminates every kind of telescope that astronomers have ever used.  Second, black hole collisions generate signals in frequencies that are within our auditory range.  Finally, LIGO was purposely constructed to have peak sensitivity in just that frequency range.

Virtually every kind of phenomenon that physicists study has a characteristic size range and a characteristic frequency/duration range.  Sound waves, for instance, are in the audiophile’s beloved “20 to 20,000” cycles per second (Hz).  Put another way, one cycle of a sound wave will last something between 1/20 and 1/20,000 second (0.05-0.000 05 second).  The speed of sound is roughly 340 meters per second which puts sound’s characteristic wavelength range between 17 meters and 17 millimeters.

No physicist would be surprised to learn that humans evolved to be sensitive to sound-making things in that size range.  We can locate an oncoming predator by its roar or by the snapping twig it stepped on but we have to look around to spot a pesky but tiny mosquito.

So the greenish box in the chart below is all about sound waves.  The yellowish box gathers together the classes of phenomena scientists study using the electromagnetic spectrum.  For instance, we use infra-red light (characteristic time range 10-15-10-12 second) to look at (or cause) molecular vibrations.

RegimesWe can investigate things that take longer than an instrument’s characteristic time by making repeated measurements, but we can’t use the instrument to resolve successive events that happen more quickly than that.  We also can’t resolve events that take place much closer together than the instrument’s characteristic length.

The electromagnetic spectrum serves us well, but it has its limitations.  The most important is that there are classes of objects out there that neither emit nor absorb light in any of its forms.  Black holes, for one.  They’re potentially crucial to the birth and development of galaxies.  However, we have little hard data on them against which to test the plethora of ideas the theoreticians have come up with.

Dark matter is another.  We know it’s subject to gravity, but to our knowledge the only way it interacts with light is by gravitational lensing.  Most scientists working on dark matter wield Occam’s Razor to conclude it’s pretty simple stuff.  Harvard cosmologist Dr Lisa Randall has suggested that there may be two kinds, one of which collects in disks that clothe themselves in galaxies.

That’s where LIGO and its successors in the gray box will help.  Their sensitivity to gravitational effects will be crucial to our understanding of dark objects.  Characteristic times in tens and thousands of seconds are no problem nor are event sizes measured in kilometers, because astronomical bodies are big.

GrWave Detectors
Gravitational instrumentation, from Christopher Berry’s blog and Web page

This is only the beginning, folks, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

~~ Rich Olcott