Yesterday’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a nice summary of efforts by the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee to detect gravitational waves. The article focuses on NEMO, the $1.8 million, 1,560 CPU, Beowulf-class computing cluster built and operated by the school’s gravitational-wave group. (Ah, I love that kind of talk.)
NEMO was commissioned in 2006. Since then, it’s been chugging through data produced by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatories (LIGO) in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. Here’s an informative cartoon of the setup.
These facilities bounce lasers back and forth to track length changes smaller than the diameter of a hydrogen atom. Such changes would occur when gravitational waves pass by and ripple through our local space-time. Relativity predicts such things, but so far, no one has detected them.
Scientists continually are improving the reach and sensitivity of these observatories. Sooner or later, they’ll detect signals from things like inspiraling pairs of neutron stars or black holes, core-collapse supernovae, and possibly even gravitational waves from the Big Bang.
You can participate, too. Since early 2005, LIGO data has been distributed to personal computers and processed using the Einstein@Home project’s nifty screensaver. This gives users eye candy in return for background use of their computers (more about it here).
Einstein@Home lets users “compete” as teams. I formed Team Astronomy as soon as the project went public. We now boast 69 members with computing credits, which are points awarded based on the amount and speed of data processing by each computer.
Team Astronomy now ranks in the top 45 in terms of recent average credits, but I think we can do better. Feel free to join us in search of gravitational waves. It may be the closest you’ll get to a Nobel prize.