And astrophysicists are getting pretty excited that it could be a rare gamma-ray burst.

A few hours ago, NASA’s Swift spacecraft detected a huge explosion in M31, better known as the Andromeda Galaxy.

And astronomers suspect it could have been one of the most violent events in the Universe – a gamma ray-burst that, in just a few seconds, could have released as much energy as our Sun in its entire lifetime.

If confirmed, this will be the closest gamma-ray burst we’ve ever detected, and will help scientists find out more about these mysterious pulses of energy.

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“The explosion seen in light will also potentially be visible in gravitational waves, a key prediction of Einstein, ending a long quest to detect these ripples in space time,” he explains.

“Unfortunately the world-wide facility for detecting these events, LIGO, is currently shut down for an upgrade and missed out on the explosion – and a potential Nobel Prize winning discovery.”

I suspect that there will be a few scientist who are absolutely spewing.

sibeen said:

I suspect that there will be a few scientist who are absolutely spewing.

OTOH, it’d be a bit embarrassing if LIGO was online and failed to detect this (relatively) nearby event. But I guess they could (continue to) claim that LIGO’s just not sensitive enough yet.

PM 2Ring said:

sibeen said:

I suspect that there will be a few scientist who are absolutely spewing.

OTOH, it’d be a bit embarrassing if LIGO was online and failed to detect this (relatively) nearby event. But I guess they could (continue to) claim that LIGO’s just not sensitive enough yet.

OTOH, if it had been running and didn’t pick up anything that would also add to the knowledge base.

sibeen said:

OTOH, if it had been running and didn’t pick up anything that would also add to the knowledge base.

Well, it’d tell us that Advanced LIGO is still rubbish & we need to throw even more money at it to improve its sensitivity…

LIGO

Cofounded in 1992 by Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever of Caltech and Rainer Weiss of MIT, LIGO is a joint project between scientists at MIT, Caltech, and many other colleges and universities. It is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). At the cost of $365 million (in 2002 USD), it is the largest and most ambitious project ever funded by the NSF.

Observations at LIGO began in 2002 and ended in 2010; no unambiguous detections of gravitational waves have been reported. The original detectors were disassembled and are currently being replaced by improved versions known as “Advanced LIGO”, scheduled to be operational by 2014.

[…]

Enhanced LIGO

After the completion of Science Run 5, initial LIGO was upgraded with certain Advanced LIGO technologies that resulted in an improved-performance configuration dubbed Enhanced LIGO. Its aim was a best-effort goal of achieving twice the sensitivity of initial LIGO by the end of the run, unlike the NSF-contracted sensitivity goals of the Initial and Advanced instruments. Some of the improvements in Enhanced LIGO included:

• Increased laser power.
• Homodyne detection.
• Output mode cleaner.
• In-vacuum readout hardware.

Science Run 6 (S6) began in July 2009 with the enhanced configurations on the 4 km detectors. It concluded in October 2010, and the disassembling of the original detectors began. An estimated four-year long effort to install and commission the Advanced LIGO detectors is currently underway.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that people have invested time & money into trying to detect gravitational waves, but I suspect that they’re throwing good money after bad, especially after the failure of Enhanced LIGO, and that the sensitivity of an Earth-based interferometer will never be good enough unless we get “lucky” and have a nearby cataclysmic event to detect.

I’ve told this story on here before, but you may not have seen it.

In 1989 or 90 I was sent to Perth to commission a reasonable sized UPS system, 400 kVA from memory, that had been installed on the first floor of the physics building at UWA. My vague recollection is that it was actually being used to power up the WA dept of health building next door. They didn’t have the room so they had rented some space off the uni.

I get the beast going after a couple of days and am standing in front of it doing checks and making adjustments when suddenly this bearded loon comes running in through the door exclaiming “WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT”! The bloke was very obviously not a happy camper. I explained to him what it was and what it was to be used for.

“Does it always make that much noise and produce that much vibration”? was his demand.

I confidently replied, “shit no, at the moment there is no load on the machine, once I put that load bank over there onto it and put it through its paces it’ll get a lot louder and the vibration will increase substantially”.

At this point the loon began going red in the face, stamping at the ground and swearing volubly.

Turns out he was a prof of physics who ran a gravity wave research lab in the basement of the building. A large nioibium bar set up that could detect a truck passing by over a kilometre away.

We did eventually try to dampen out the vibrations that were causing his issues, mounting the UPS on rubber feet etc, but this thing weighed about 4 tonnes and was never going to be quiet.

sibeen said:

I’ve told this story on here before, but you may not have seen it.

[…]

Turns out he was a prof of physics who ran a gravity wave research lab in the basement of the building. A large nioibium bar set up that could detect a truck passing by over a kilometre away.

We did eventually try to dampen out the vibrations that were causing his issues, mounting the UPS on rubber feet etc, but this thing weighed about 4 tonnes and was never going to be quiet.

The poor bugger. The niobium bar gravitational wave detector vaguely rings a bell, but I can’t remember if I’ve seen your story before, sibeen.

But you’d think he’d have the sense to set his detector up in the middle of nowhere… I guess that wouldn’t be convenient, though. :)

sibeen said:

“The explosion seen in light will also potentially be visible in gravitational waves, a key prediction of Einstein, ending a long quest to detect these ripples in space time,” he explains.

“Unfortunately the world-wide facility for detecting these events, LIGO, is currently shut down for an upgrade and missed out on the explosion – and a potential Nobel Prize winning discovery.”

I suspect that there will be a few scientist who are absolutely spewing.

lol@us encore une fois

sibeen’s story about UPS happens to be completely relevant in this thread.

The Gamma Ray Burst in M31 does not exist, according to twitter. It was an ordinary X ray source that had been there all along.

Details on http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~pae9/twitter/GRBM31.html

SWIFT has a program to search for GRBs in nearby galaxies with a low statistical significance cutoff – hence large chance of false detection. The source is a known object, seen in a bunch of earlier observations. The team at SWIFT never said it was a GRB, they said instead that it was “a faint Burst-Alert-Telescope transient”. There was a lack of access to the best data analysis software (power outage?) and preliminary analysis using the wrong software overestimated the brightness, hence the announcement.

The final chronology is this:

1. BAT triggered on a low-siginifance event near M31. These are probably spurious but occasionally real.
2. Swift spun round to point at the location BAT identified, and found a known X-ray source.
3. Due to problems with the normal data products, only low-quality data were available. These data suggested that the X-ray object was much brighter than normal: an outbursting source.
4. I managed to analyse the problematic data, and found that the source was not in outburst. This was announced.
5. The full dataset became available and confirmed that the X-ray object is not in outburst.

Update: Possible ‘Nearby’ Gamma Ray Burst Alert Was False Alarm

Following the late night news yesterday of a possible gamma ray burst in our next door neighboring galaxy Andromeda, it was an “Oh darn!” moment this morning to find out the big event was likely a false alarm. The false alert — and the ensuing false excitement — was due to an unlikely combination of Swift’s Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) detecting what was a previously known object and a power outage at Goddard Space Flight Center and Swift Data Center, so that the data couldn’t be analyzed by the regular team of astronomers around the world.

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