Three Americans win Nobel Prize in physics for gravitational wave discovery...
Source: Washington Post
Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne have won the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics. The three are members of the LIGO-Virgo detector collaboration that discovered gravitational waves. The prize was awarded "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves," the committee said in a news release.
“This year’s prize is about a discovery that shook the world," said the Nobel committee representative Göran K. Hansson during a conference in Stockholm on Tuesday.
One half of the prize went to Weiss, born in Berlin and now a U.S. citizen, is a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The other half was split by Barish, a Nebraska native, and Thorne, who was born in Utah. Both work at the California Institute of Technology.
"When we first discovered them back in September 2015 many of us didn't believe it," said Weiss, on the phone to the Stockholm conference. It took months for the scientists to convince themselves that had in fact heard gravitational waves, he said.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/10/03/nobel-prize-in-physics-won-by-rainer-weiss-barry-barish-and-kip-thorne/?outputType=default-article&deferJs=true
= new reply since forum marked as read
Astronomy Picture of the day (Sept. 28)
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap170928.html
LIGO-Virgo GW170814 Skymap
Illustration Credit: LIGO- Virgo Collaboration - Optical Sky Data: A. Mellinger
Explanation: From around planet Earth three gravitational wave detectors have now reported a joint detection of ripples in spacetime, the fourth announced detection of a binary black hole merger in the distant Universe. The event was recorded on 2017 August 14, and so christened GW170814, by the LIGO observatory sites in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana, and the more recently operational Virgo Observatory near Pisa, Italy. The signal was emitted in the final moments of the coalescence of two black holes of 31 and 25 solar masses located about 1.8 billion light-years away. But comparing the timing of the gravitational wave detections at all three sites allowed astronomers to vastly improve the location of the signal's origin on the sky. Just above the Magellanic clouds and generally toward the constellation Eridanus, the only sky region consistent with signals in all three detectors is indicated by the yellow contour line in this all-sky map. The all-sky projection includes the arc of our Milky Way Galaxy. An improved three-detector location of the gravitational wave source allowed rapid follow-up observations by other, more conventional, electromagnetic wave observatories that can search for potentially related signals. The addition of the Virgo detector also allowed the gravitational wave polarization to be measured, a property that further confirms predictions of Einstein's general relativity.
