Building a Galaxy-Scale Gravitational Wave Detector | Dr. Shami Chatterjee | Talks at Google

As black holes spiral around each other in the distant universe, Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of space-time itself. We have now detected such ripples from stellar-mass black holes, as well as directly imaging a supermassive black hole.

Shami Chatterjee, an astronomer at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science and a member of the NANOGrav collaboration, talks about ongoing efforts to build a Galaxy-scale detector to observe low-frequency gravitational waves from the mergers of supermassive black holes in the distant universe, as well as some of the unexpected discoveries along the way. The unexpected discoveries include enigmatic “fast radio bursts”, bright millisecond flashes of radio waves that pop off thousands of times every day, all over the sky, with astonishing energy output.

Dr. Chatterjee searches for and studies neutron stars, and how to use their lighthouse beams as clocks to build a long-wavelength gravitational wave detector. He has done foundational work on fast radio bursts that has been featured twice on the cover of Nature, and plays a small role in the Event Horizon Telescope team that won the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for imaging a black hole.

[DeborahJB]

This is friggin' incredible!!! Holy smokes! 25:05"

[rondavison-vq]

What are the chances of three black holes or neutron stars being in a death spiral together?
Since the orthogonal detection detects space stretching on one dimension, the orientation is important or the two orthogonal detectors do not get maximum opposing dimension changes to detect. This means the pointing vector of the detectors has a directional sensitivity.
What if two or more orthogonal detectors where used to get pointing direction magnitude changes between the pairs of orthogonal detectors.
You can have three orthogonal detectors instead of two to form a 3D detector. why is only two needed or sufficient? Would 3D help? could that provide the same pointing magnitude information? Are two dimensional gravitational waves possible in 3D?
or do these spinning mass form a plane that these 2D wave emanate from? Why do they stay in a planer and not spread out in the 3rd dimension?
Really great talk, got my Qs spinning like black holes...

[drerichu]

Thanks for sharing your research! Although I must say detecting any wave (EM or gravitational alike) with wavelength in the order of light years is a very very very difficult task!

[Joshua-ynzx]

Do Planets have distinct Gravitational Signatures??