6 ms·

A team from UC Santa Cruz used the data from the Swope telescope in Chile to locate the source of the gravitation waves and observe the light from the event. Th

• espadrine 9y ago
  Congrats! How do you automate screening the sky? Do you have robots that map stars, diff the images, and send an email when the diff has a new spot of light? How frequently does the sky get fully screened? Could there be events fast enough that we don't detect them?
  • knice 9y ago
    Apologies, I'm not one of the researchers involved in the discovery. I'm just the web developer who built the announcement site for UCSC. Ryan Foley will participate in a Reddit AMA tomorrow (Tuesday, 10/17). I imagine your questions might get answered there.
  • semaphoreP 9y ago
    Not involved in this, I'm guessing this is how it goes: there are algorithms that automatically register the image that was just taken, diff it with a reference image of the sky from before, and if there's a significant difference that passes some false positive tests, then there's some notification for human intervention. Indeed there could be events we are missing right now. Astronomers are building instruments that have larger fields of view (e.g., LSST), so that they can scan the sky ever few days.
  • knice 9y ago
    This paper by one of the team members has more detail about the process used to narrow down the search field to a list of galaxies and identify possible locations of the event: [edit]: link to the exact paragraph that discusses the method http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2017/10/13/science.aap9811.full#p-9 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2017/10/13/scien...
• andreasklinger 9y ago
  Sidenote: Amazing how international the collaboration in this industry is. Kudos to you people
  • zyngaro 9y ago
    Smart people have a tendency to cooperation and collaboration.
    • mortenjorck 9y ago
      That's a nice feel-good position to express, but is there any empirical evidence for it? There are plenty of very smart people (in academia) who are narcissistic, paranoid of potential rivals, and generally the opposite of cooperative and collaborative.
      • macintux 9y ago
        It might be more of a question of field. Based on my hopelessly incomplete view from the outside, in cosmology and closely-related subjects, it's impossible to work independently and accomplish much of anything. You need observations from many different sources.
      • zyngaro 9y ago
        Narcissistic, paranoid are not traits what I call smart people. Humility on the other hand is. I guess studying and observing the universe makes people humble. The great physicians Einstein, Bohr and co of the beginning of 20 century worked together a lot for example. But anyway according the first fundamental of human stupidity there is fixed ratio of stupid poeple in any group of people. I think we can agree those you are referring to can be called stupid.
        • bdamm 9y ago
          It's a relief to see that raw IQ is no longer the widely accepted standard for "smart".
        • 9y ago
• Balgair 9y ago
  Go Slugs!
• dnautics 9y ago
  isn't it generally accepted that gold and other heavy elements are formed in supernovae?
  • WD-42 9y ago
    Yes, but we observe more gold and other heavy elements than can be attributed to supernovae alone. Events like neutron star mergers might help explain where the rest comes from.
    • dnautics 9y ago
      is that really significant? There are about 10 supernovas in the universe per second; neutron star mergers must to be at least 2 orders of magnitude rarer, estimating based on the percentage of stars that wind up becoming neutron stars