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Astronomy
The New Frontier
B.S. Sathyaprakash
Gravitational Physics Group, School of Physics and Astronomy
David McKechan
Devanka Pathak
Ian Harry
Edmund Schluessel
Jack Yu
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Einsteins Gravity
According to Einstein,
gravity is not a force but a
warping of space & time
Space is said to be warped
if familiar laws of
geometry in flat space do
not hold
Time is warped if clocks at
different points in space
dont run at the same rate
Someone living close to a
black hole would age more
slowly relative to their
twin sister on Earth
Gravitational Waves - The New Frontier
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Einsteins Gravity
Earth Moves around sun
not because of there is
a force of gravity
Earth moves in
straightest possible
paths in the curved
geometry of space
caused by the Sun
Gravitational force,
just as all other forces,
is transmitted at a
finite speed
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Einsteins Gravity
A
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Plus polarization
Gravitational Waves - The New Frontier
Cross polarization
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A world network of
Interferometric Gravitational
Wave Detectors
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British-German GEO
American
at
American
LIGO
at Livingstone
Hanford
French
ItalianLIGO
VIRGO
near
PISA
Laser
Interferometer
Space
Antenna
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Astronomical Sources
Compact binary mergers
Binary neutron stars
Binary black holes
Black hole-neutron star binaries
Continuous waves
Rapidly spinning neutron stars or
other objects
Stochastic background
Primordial background
Astrophysical background
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Future Searches
Search for black holes with spins
Would require at least 10-100 times more
computational cost
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Amplitude
Increasing Spin
Time
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What do we need?
Compute cycles: a lot of them
Our algorithms are
embarrassingly parallel
Literally no communication
between different compute
nodes
Data Access:
Each detector produces about 30
TBytes of data per year and will
run for 2 to 3 years at a time
About 10% of this should be
available for compute nodes
Multiple nodes (100s of them)
might access data at any one
time
Centralized data archives are a
bottleneck and a nightmare in
our game
Gravitational Waves - The New Frontier
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Gravitational Astronomy
Quantum theory
Fundamental physics
Extreme Gravity
GW observations with
ARCCA
(Very) Early Universe
Cosmology
Astrophysics
Stellar interiors
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