Earth Seems To Be Wobbling On Massive Gravitational Ripples

hello wonderful person this is anton and today we're going to be talking about a very interesting study and a very interesting proposition that sort of suggests that we might have detected the gravitational waves that our planet is sort of wobbling inside of or basically right now as you're watching this video without even realizing your body my body our whole planet is sort of being shifted back and forth kind of like a boat on the ocean in some sense very similar to that buoy that you see on the screen that is being shifted left right up and down by the activity of the water itself now this is sort of a very good analogy but how can we feel all of this and how do we know all of this because our bodies cannot possibly feel anything here and honestly 10 years ago most scientists would probably completely not care about any of this it would actually not make sense because most of this was extremely theoretical but in the last five years ever since the original detection of the collision between two different black holes and ever since the pretty much weekly detections coming out of lego the research station that's responsible for discovering all of this we've pretty much made it a fact that gravitational waves are a thing we know that for example when black holes collide they produce observable effects that we can detect from planet earth and the more mass of the black hole the more likely the frequency and the amplitude are going to be different from some of the other black holes so for example smaller black holes will usually spin around one another really fast at the end and so the frequency is going to be really high but the amplitude is going to be lower because the total mass is lower and in this case you can kind of think of this as a high frequency but not a very loud sound and this is what we've been detecting for the past few years including of course collisions from neutron stars telogens between a black hole and a neutron star and we believe that other events such as for example a collapse of a star to become a black hole will also produce various types of gravitational waves but more massive black holes such as for example supermassive black holes will produce much lower frequencies as a matter of fact something that's extremely extremely low not even 1 hertz in frequency but the amplitude is going to be much higher so it's kind of like having a very low tone but an extremely loud tone and this in itself will produce very very powerful and very influential gravitational waves however this is something we're not able to detect right now because for ligo which is right here on this graph the limit of frequency is between 10 hertz and 10 kilohertz which means that it can easily detect certain types of collisions between smaller black holes and possibly even detect certain types of supernova but anything below that is essentially invisible to it now in this graph we also have something called e-lisa or the evolved laser interferometer space antenna which is supposed to be able to detect all of this but the thing is this is still in very very early planning and this is going to be an interferometer orbiting around the sun itself currently planned for sometime in 2034 so maybe in 15 years from now we might have something like this but until this is operational we're not really able to detect lower frequencies very well and so detecting is very powerful and very influential collisions is at the moment beyond our reach however some scientists a few years ago realized that there's maybe a way for us to detect all of this just not very specifically it's something we can do basically as an average calculation of all of the waves together just to see if there's really any effect on planet earth if we could somehow calculate the precise position of planet earth and how it essentially changes throughout for example several years we might be able to find a way to see if it actually is being sort of wobbled around just like that buoy on the surface of the water so if we can actually calculate where the earth is located we might be able to find the evidence for even more gravitational waves that affect planet earth and it just so happens that there is such a technique and is being sort of developed over the past decade or so and that technique relies on something absolutely fascinating something we've been studying for a long time pulsars specifically millisecond pulsars the thing about millisecond posters is that they actually represent some of the most accurate clocks in the universe not the most accurate but they're pretty close a typical millisecond pulsar is essentially a neutron star that spins ridiculously fast it spins several hundred times per second and the pulsations produced by these neutron stars are so extremely precise that you can literally use a bunch of them to geolocate yourself anywhere in the universe now this is a pretty interesting concept because it can eventually in the future possibly allow us to travel very vast regions of space and know exactly where we're going but right now at this moment what we can actually do by studying these posters and their positions is identify a lot of things about planet earth and its location in the galaxy and more specifically here we can actually establish if the planet is orbiting around the galaxy as it should or if something is shifting its locations compared to some of the posters in the galaxy now the biggest and the most well-known such study is this one right here known as nanograph and i've briefly talked about this in one of the previous videos as well there's also one such measurement going on in australia with the parks telescope and there's the european version of this as well but the most famous and the one with the most accurate results so far is definitely the nanograph and not so long ago only a few months ago nanograph released one of its major data releases in the last few years identifying some really peculiar patterns and the new updated version of this paper is also available in the description below now in general the way that nanograph works is by collecting all of this extremely precise observational data from 45 very well known millisecond posters in other words it's an extremely simple observation you just keep looking at these posters measure and collect all of the pulsation data for many many years and then try to compare and see if anything doesn't seem like it should be there for example if suddenly the pulsations seem to be arriving a little bit later or a little bit earlier something is going on there now obviously if it's one or two pulsars maybe that's something going on with the neutron star itself but if all 45 of them are experiencing something really similar at around the same time now that's something that we definitely need to investigate and in some way you can even think of this as literally a galaxy sized gravitational wave detector because what essentially these posters are doing is giving us very very precise observations of any potential shifts and any potential changes in the space time itself so it kind of acts like a ligo but on much much wider scale and basically provides us with data from not just one single event like black hole collisions but from many different events that may have happened in the period of thousands and millions of years and also over a much wider area of space equivalent to a chunk of a galaxy itself and theoretically if these gravitational waves are indeed affecting us right now what we should be detecting is some sort of a slight wobble here and there just like that buoy in the water so for example over a period of several years we might notice that earth might have shifted by just a few centimeters in one direction or the other now obviously here we're not talking about kilometers we're not really talking about an extremely large shift kind of like what i'm producing right here but a very very minute shift of only a few centimeters which is of course why it's so ridiculously hard to try to discover any of this because these are really really minute changes and very small observations and although so far the results are not definitive they're not certain there is something happening here after all according to the scientists that released this paper in other words there does seem to be a hint of what's known as gravitational wave background kind of like the cosmic microwave background but in this case just gravitational waves and what the data suggests is that once in a while there is a slight deviation from the pulsations in these pulsars and it's not just one or two many of them seem to be having these tiny nanosecond variations over the period of about 13 years in some cases the deviations are about 100 or so nanoseconds which implies that if this is the case or if indeed this is actually what's happening here the earth itself might have actually shifted by about 100 feet or so or about 30 meters now that's of course a very preliminary discovery and that's something that needs to be investigated for possibly at least one more decade but it does suggest that there is what's known as a gravitational wave background after all something that essentially squeezes stretches and shifts around every single object in the universe without those objects even feeling it because unlike the buoy on the ocean you don't actually feel anything here and if this is the case and if indeed we're discovering these very massive and very powerful gravitational waves possibly from some supermassive black holes in a distance it might help us answer a lot of questions like for example do supermassive black holes collide ironically the supermassive black collision right now is still not a very well understood phenomenon theoretically at least they should never be able to collide but we also cannot explain the massive size of some black holes without these collisions but this is actually another topic and i've talked about this in one of the previous videos the video on the so-called final parsec problem the video that should be popping up somewhere right there above my head but the scientists in this paper are also very careful to not call this gravitational wave background just yet they kind of refer to it as noise basically a gravitational hum of some sorts we don't really know what's causing it but chances are it is from supermassive black holes after all the thing is we're probably only going to discover all of this once other studies are able to produce even more data or once we're able to create something as large as elisa where the detectors are able to detect much lower frequencies and thus feel these waves coming from really really far away distances and in that sense well that's pretty much it i wanted to mention there's really nothing we know so far it just seems that there is something going on with these poster detections it cannot be explained as something happening in the pulsars though mostly because it seems to be happening to all of them not just one of them but the scientists also suggest that maybe this is something we just don't really understand maybe it's because of acceleration of the planet around the solar system for example so in the future we'll know for now we don't on that note thank you so much for watching subscribe if you still haven't share this with someone who loves learning about space and sciences and maybe come back tomorrow to learn something you may have not known before also maybe support this channel patreon or by buying the wonderful person t-shirt you can find in the description i'll see you tomorrow space out and as always bye [Music] you

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 198,804

Keywords: anton petrov, science, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, technology, steven universe, space engine, universe sandbox 2, gravitational wave background, gravity waves, nanograv, ligo, black hole collision, gracedb, black hole, neutron star, neutron star collision, supermassive black hole collision, pulsar detection, elisa, interferometer, milisecond pulsar, gravitational wave detector

Id: -JftpW2--54

Length: 12min 19sec (739 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2021