Adhikari: An Alpha Centauri black hole merger would overwhelm LIGO electronics
Rana Adhikari · The Technical Challenges of Measuring Gravitational Waves - Rana Adhikari of LIGO · Y Combinator · Sep 15, 2017 · at 1:06:10
Caltech physics professor Rana Adhikari calculates the physical impact on Earth and LIGO if a binary black hole merger occurred at the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.
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“Like the ones we detected were at, let's say several hundred million light years, and Alpha Centauri is only four light years, I believe, so it would be stronger by that factor of a hundred million. And, which sounds like a lot, it is a lot, but that means that that motion of 10 to the -18 meters would have been 10 to the -10 meters, which for us would have been like a hardware destroying level of signal.”
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More from Rana Adhikari
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“I think in our data there must be, probably we could double the number of signals we have right now if we were to, I mean, that's my guess. It could be much more.”
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“We would be able to find signals from Basically, the, all the way back. I mean, it would have. We would find the first stars in the universe, and they were collapsing, if they exist, which I think they do.”
Adhikari: Decades of required effort would have deterred early gravitational wave researchers
“If they, I think if they had known how tough it would be, or that it was going to take fifties, five years to have success, probably no one would have started.”
Adhikari: LIGO stabilizes lasers ten million times beyond commercial models
“So we take the best laser in the world that we can find, and then we stabilize it and make it about ten million times more stable than what you can buy, and then it's kind of just barely good enough, and we're gonna have to do better if we want to do better.”
Adhikari: Laser radiation pressure physically moves LIGO's 40-kilogram mirrors
“There's so much laser power that when you, it's weird to think about, but there's so much laser power when we hit the mirror, it moves the mirror. And the mirror, if you, to imagine it, is about this big. And it is 40 kilograms”