An Acoustical Analogue of a Galactic-scale Gravitational-Wave Detector [CL]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1803.05285


By precisely monitoring the “ticks” of Nature’s most precise clocks (millisecond pulsars), scientists are trying to detect the “ripples in spacetime” (gravitational waves) produced by the inspirals of supermassive black holes in the centers of distant merging galaxies. Here we describe a relatively simple demonstration that uses two metronomes and a microphone to illustrate several techniques used by pulsar astronomers to search for gravitational waves. An adapted version of this demonstration could be used as an instructional laboratory investigation at the undergraduate level.

Read this paper on arXiv…

M. Lam, J. Romano, J. Key, et. al.
Thu, 15 Mar 2018
9/53

Comments: 21 pages, 9 figures, submitted to the American Journal of Physics