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Dear Colleagues,
Many of us have now heard the rumour that the LIGO experiment
has detected gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger,
that a Nature paper is scheduled to appear Thursday, February 11,
and that NSF has scheduled a press conference Thursday morning at 10:30 AM
at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. "for a status report
on the effort to detect gravitational waves -- or ripples in the
fabric of spacetime -- using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave
Observatory (LIGO)." The Media Advisory from LIGO can be found at
https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/news/ligo20160208
It says nothing about the rumoured discovery, of course. There was
a strong suspicion when the rumour circulated last week, that it was
only a "simulated" discovery --- false data injected into the LIGO
pipeline to test it out --- which only the very top few LIGO scientists
knew to be false. Tweets reporting a 5.1 sigma detection of black holes
of mass 36 and 29 solar masses, spiralling inward to merge into a
single Kerr black hole of mass 62 solar masses, caught by two detectors
with a time delay given by the light travel time between them, seemed
just too good to be true. However, as more collateral entities have been
swept up in the rumour and activated to respond,
it seems increasingly likely that it is the real thing. We will soon
know, one way or the other!
I share this "breaking news" with you, in case, like me, you would
hate to wake up Thursday, unaware and unsuspecting,
only to learn about it, after-the-fact, from the newspaper or some yahoo
news feed.
Cheers,
Paul
Paul R. Shapiro
Frank N. Edmonds, Jr. Regents Professor in Astronomy
The University of Texas at Austin
and
Chair, Division of Astrophysics
The American Physical Society