5 ms·
LIGO collaboration member here: we focus on maximizing the cumulative number of detections over time, and it turns out that by turning the detector off for a ye
by pinko 5y ago
LIGO collaboration member here: we focus on maximizing the cumulative number of detections over time, and it turns out that by turning the detector off for a year to upgrade it, we can increase the sensitivity so much that a year after that we will have more total detections than if we had left it running continuous for two years. So you also have to think about all the distant/faint signals we would never be able to detect because we kept listening at too low a sensitivity...
(We do make sure that we have a dramatically less sensitive sister detector in Germany, called GEO, listening whenever we're not so that we'll see something really close and loud, like a galactic supernova, even when LIGO is offline.)
- wpietri 5y agoI sincerely love that your reply to FOMO was to point out how his FOMO should be even worse. This is exactly how my brain works when I'm optimizing something: I have to balance one obsession with all the other things I need to obsess about.
- netcraft 5y agoThanks for the info! I expected it was something like this, that you expect the increased sensitivity is worth it. I just wish we had more observatories running in different sensitivities - we've just got to get the cost down, thats all :) I didn't know about GEO, thanks for that!
- ars 5y agoThat makes me think of the "Wait calculation" in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Wait_calcu...
- foo92691 5y agoAlso the experimentalists get very antsy when they/(we) can't touch the instrument. :-)