Unlike electromagnetic waves - the light seen by traditional telescopes - gravitational waves are extremely weak.
Strong gravitational waves are thought to be produced by the collision of two neutron stars.
The pulsar and white dwarf pair emit gravitational waves and the binary star system gradually loses energy.
The early universe is also thought to have produced a background of gravitational waves from quantum fluctuations.
Researchers are extremely confident they now have the technology to detect gravitational waves.
The SKA will join the hunt for gravitational waves ripples in the structure of space predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.
Towards the end of this process, an enormous burst of gravitational waves.
These exploit the fact that gravitational waves should cause space to stretch in one direction and shrink in the dimension at right angles to it.
Compelling independent corroboration would come from a spacecraft that can see the burst of gamma-ray radiation expected to accompany the cataclysmic events that produce gravitational waves.
Today's attempts to detect gravitational waves use instruments called interferometers.
The coalescence of two black holes would create even stronger gravitational waves, but physicists believe that there are fewer black holes than neutron stars, so such events would be rarer.
So Stojkovic and Mureika have reasoned that the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a planned international gravitational observatory, should not detect any gravitational waves emanating from the lower-dimensional epochs of the early universe.
Indeed, in 1974 Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor recorded an indirect sighting when they showed that a pair of stars spiralling towards each other was radiating energy in the form of gravitational waves at exactly the rate predicted by Einstein.
"If there is a supernova in our vicinity during the next couple of months, our chances of detecting and measuring the resulting gravitational waves are good, " said Professor Karsten Danzmann, head of the International Centre for Gravitational Physics, which is jointly run by the Max Planck Society and the University of Hanover.
As the leader of the experimental gravity group at Columbia, he is looking into what happens when two black holes or neutron stars merge in the distant universe, and is collaborating with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, a facility funded by the National Science Foundation and located in Louisiana and Hanford, Wash. that aims to detect cosmic gravitational waves.
As the moons pass close to - or even through the rings, their gravitational pull tugs waves of the ring particles towards them, twisting and shaping the ring and sweeping paths through them.
Indeed, some at the meeting argued that if aliens were to use an astronomical phenomenon called gravitational lensing (in which the gravitational field of the sun bends and amplifies radio waves and light from Earth), human signals could be amplified to the point where even the light from cities would be visible.
ECONOMIST: An argument over whether to send messages to aliens
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