Gravitational Waves detected!!!

February 12, 2016 in blog, for_educators, for_press, for_researchers, for_users, in_the_news, news, success_story, Uncategorized

On February 11th, 2016 (10:30AM EST), scientists from Caltech, MIT and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration together with representatives of the National Science Foundation, announced in a live press conference, the first direct detection of gravitational waves.
The event detected, named GW150914, was produced by two colliding black holes, inspariling and merging together. This signal was detected by LIGO on September 14th, 2015.

Details of this discovery can be found in the following papers:

Many of the researchers running simulations and analysing data in several of our clusters are directly involved in the efforts for accurately modelling, simulating and detecting gravitational wave signals.
As a matter of fact, one of the simulations used for visualizing one of the movies screened during the announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves, was performed on SciNet’s General Purpose Cluster (GPC).

“The first detection of gravitational waves passing through Earth is a tremendous discovery. These waves were generated by never before observed astronomical objects, colliding black holes. I am very grateful for SciNet and Compute Canada to provide the computing resources needed to explore the properties of binary black holes, research that was instrumental in building the waveform-templates that LIGO used in its momentous discovery.”
Prof. Harald Pfeiffer (Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Toronto)

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Simulation of a binary black-hole system emitting gravitational radiation (gravitational waves) performed on SciNet’s General Purpose Cluster (GPC).
These simulations were performed by solving Einstein’s equations of General Relativity using a code co-developed on SciNet, by the SXS/CITA collaboration.
Credit: SXS/CITA/SciNet
Another of the videos displayed on the press-conf, was also produced by solving Einstein equations using this same computer code co-developed on SciNet by the SXS/CITA collaboration.