4 ms·

Events big enough to be detected are quite rare, but the phenomenon you are asking about is more a financial reality than a "convenient coincidence" as you put

by yodon 9y ago

Events big enough to be detected are quite rare, but the phenomenon you are asking about is more a financial reality than a "convenient coincidence" as you put it. There is a pretty steep curve connecting sensitivity and cost, so when the team that built LIGO was designing it, they used the best available models of colliding black hole event rates to estimate the sensitivity required to deliver a conclusive result in a reasonable amount of time. If you're getting 10 events/second with a device like this, you probably overpaid for sensitivity and if you're getting 1 event per century you're probably not going to be able to maintain the operating expenses to still be running when the detectable event occurs (and, as critically, none of the people involved will be able to get the data they need in the time they need it to get their PhD's, assistant profesorships, or tenured positions, so you can't get the labor force you need for your experiment to work on it, which is really what sets the acceptable duration of most experiments in practice). It looks like the original estimates were pretty good, so events are coming in at about the rate the experimenters hoped they would see them.

mturmon 9y ago
Hmm...are the rates of black holes per volume well-constrained at all? I was under the impression that it's a possibility that dark matter consists prominently of primordial BHs? The truth or falsity of this would seem to have a big effect on rates.
- privong 9y ago
  > are the rates of black holes per volume well-constrained at all? There are estimates. But two of the three LIGO detections are of black holes that are more massive than we had expected to exist (~ a few tens of solar masses). Previously we had convincing examples of black holes with <~ 10 solar masses and others with >~ 1e6 solar masses. But since we didn't have any convincing observational detections of BHs with ~20-40 solar masses, it's safe to say that the volume density is poorly constrained for that mass range. At the high end we have a reasonable estimate of the volume density, because we think all galaxies with spheroid components have a black hole and that the black hole's mass is linked to the spheroid. > I was under the impression that it's a possibility that dark matter consists prominently of primordial BHs? It depends on what you mean by "primordial". Micro-lensing experiments (when a star is brightly made brighter by the gravitational focusing of light from an object passing between us and the star), mostly looking towards the LMC/SMC [e.g., 0] have tried to address this. My recollection is that there aren't enough stellar mass black holes around to account for all of dark matter. Assuming Hawking radiation exists, low-mass primordial black holes should have evaporated by now, leaving only the more massive ones. There's a range in between the two, but I'm not sure if you can fit enough of them in a galaxy to account for dark matter while still being consistent with the sensitivity of the microlensing surveys. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_Gravitational_Lensing_Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_Gravitational_Lensing_... > The truth or falsity of this would seem to have a big effect on rates. Possibly. Though in order to emit GWs, pairs of black holes have to become bound to each other. If black holes make up the dark matter halos, they probably have large velocities relative to each other, which would limit their ability to form bound pairs (though it is possible with 3-body interactions). I am not aware of estimates of the BH pair-formation rate in halos _if_ DM haloes are in fact made of black holes. But the event rate probably can't be extraordinarily high, otherwise we might expect to see dark matter halos becoming less massive as the Universe ages. Though there are many confounding factors that might hide such a signal.
  - mturmon 9y ago
    Thanks a lot for this reply.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
privong 9y ago
> If you're getting 10 events/second with a device like this, you probably overpaid for sensitivity Aside from issues processing and disentangling the overlapping events in a situation with that high of an event rate, more events would not be bad, so I'm not sure I'd call it "overpaying". Imagine the kind of population demographics that could be built up if we were detecting that many events.
- yodon 9y ago
  It's not that physicists wouldn't love to capture all those events, it's that the cost of building instruments like LIGO is nearly prohibitively high and the cost is a strong function of the sensitivity of the instrument. If you aim too high in your sensitivity aspirations, the cost hits a point where the experiment simply can't be funded.
  - privong 9y ago
    > If you aim too high in your sensitivity aspirations, the cost hits a point where the experiment simply can't be funded. Agreed. I misunderstood your meaning then; I'd interpreted your wording to mean that "overpaid" was still within the bounds of reasonable expectations for funding. "Overpaid" didn't imply "too expensive to build", to me.
  - davrosthedalek 9y ago
    It also might not be possible to build the system more sensitive. Took them, what, 30 years or so, to get to this sensitivity.
- eanzenberg 9y ago
  It's a balance between cost and sensitivity, and remember that 1 discovery would prove the experiment a "success". I think the way it was planned and executed was great. Also, I think the proof that gravitational waves is far more exciting than comparing gravity wave signatures among a sample of celestial collisions.
  - dwaltrip 9y ago

by yodon 9y ago

mturmon 9y ago

Hmm...are the rates of black holes per volume well-constrained at all? I was under the impression that it's a possibility that dark matter consists prominently of primordial BHs? The truth or falsity of this would seem to have a big effect on rates.

privong 9y ago
> are the rates of black holes per volume well-constrained at all? There are estimates. But two of the three LIGO detections are of black holes that are more massive than we had expected to exist (~ a few tens of solar masses). Previously we had convincing examples of black holes with <~ 10 solar masses and others with >~ 1e6 solar masses. But since we didn't have any convincing observational detections of BHs with ~20-40 solar masses, it's safe to say that the volume density is poorly constrained for that mass range. At the high end we have a reasonable estimate of the volume density, because we think all galaxies with spheroid components have a black hole and that the black hole's mass is linked to the spheroid. > I was under the impression that it's a possibility that dark matter consists prominently of primordial BHs? It depends on what you mean by "primordial". Micro-lensing experiments (when a star is brightly made brighter by the gravitational focusing of light from an object passing between us and the star), mostly looking towards the LMC/SMC [e.g., 0] have tried to address this. My recollection is that there aren't enough stellar mass black holes around to account for all of dark matter. Assuming Hawking radiation exists, low-mass primordial black holes should have evaporated by now, leaving only the more massive ones. There's a range in between the two, but I'm not sure if you can fit enough of them in a galaxy to account for dark matter while still being consistent with the sensitivity of the microlensing surveys. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_Gravitational_Lensing_Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_Gravitational_Lensing_... > The truth or falsity of this would seem to have a big effect on rates. Possibly. Though in order to emit GWs, pairs of black holes have to become bound to each other. If black holes make up the dark matter halos, they probably have large velocities relative to each other, which would limit their ability to form bound pairs (though it is possible with 3-body interactions). I am not aware of estimates of the BH pair-formation rate in halos _if_ DM haloes are in fact made of black holes. But the event rate probably can't be extraordinarily high, otherwise we might expect to see dark matter halos becoming less massive as the Universe ages. Though there are many confounding factors that might hide such a signal.
- mturmon 9y ago
  Thanks a lot for this reply.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

privong 9y ago

> If you're getting 10 events/second with a device like this, you probably overpaid for sensitivity Aside from issues processing and disentangling the overlapping events in a situation with that high of an event rate, more events would not be bad, so I'm not sure I'd call it "overpaying". Imagine the kind of population demographics that could be built up if we were detecting that many events.

yodon 9y ago
It's not that physicists wouldn't love to capture all those events, it's that the cost of building instruments like LIGO is nearly prohibitively high and the cost is a strong function of the sensitivity of the instrument. If you aim too high in your sensitivity aspirations, the cost hits a point where the experiment simply can't be funded.
- privong 9y ago
  > If you aim too high in your sensitivity aspirations, the cost hits a point where the experiment simply can't be funded. Agreed. I misunderstood your meaning then; I'd interpreted your wording to mean that "overpaid" was still within the bounds of reasonable expectations for funding. "Overpaid" didn't imply "too expensive to build", to me.
- davrosthedalek 9y ago
  It also might not be possible to build the system more sensitive. Took them, what, 30 years or so, to get to this sensitivity.
eanzenberg 9y ago
It's a balance between cost and sensitivity, and remember that 1 discovery would prove the experiment a "success". I think the way it was planned and executed was great. Also, I think the proof that gravitational waves is far more exciting than comparing gravity wave signatures among a sample of celestial collisions.
- dwaltrip 9y ago