The Pioneer Anomaly Options

[remcook]

http://www.planetary.org/news/2005/pioneer_anomaly_faq.html

The planetary society may be checking it out...

The Planetary Society has committed to raise the funds to preserve the priceless Pioneer data from destruction.


After years of analysis, but without a final conclusion, NASA, astonishingly, gave up trying to solve the "Pioneer Anomaly" and provided no funds to analyze the data. The Pioneer data exists on a few hundred ancient 7- and 9-track magnetic tapes, which can only be read on "antique" outdated computers. The agency is going to scrap, literally demolish, the only computers able to access and process that data in the next few months!

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Thanks jamescanvin for the image and the info it contains.

What would be fine is if somebody have the log-log plot, amplitude versus frequency, with expected domain for each gravitationnal wave source, and the expected sensitivity of each instrument.

What I heard (to check) is that the LIGO gravitational wave observatory is curently reaching its full sensitivity, but it still detected nothing (the only thing it could detect, neutron stars spiraling, would happen only once a year in average).

[jamescanvin]

What would be fine is if somebody have the log-log plot, amplitude versus frequency, with expected domain for each gravitationnal wave source, and the expected sensitivity of each instrument.

Yes, that was what I was looking for yesterday, but couldn't while rushing round.
Couldn't have been looking very hard as a quick search this morning and, ta-dar!



I think that curve is for Advanced LIGO , Standard LIGO is about one order of magintude less sensitive.

What I heard (to check) is that the LIGO gravitational wave observatory is curently reaching its full sensitivity, but it still detected nothing (the only thing it could detect, neutron stars spiraling, would happen only once a year in average).

Yes, I don't think we need to start rethinking gravitational wave theory just yet, it's not too surprising that nothing has been detected by LIGO so far. Lets wait for Advanced LIGO first (2009)

James

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Yes, that was what I was looking for yesterday, but couldn't while rushing round.
Couldn't have been looking very hard as a quick search this morning and, ta-dar!
James

Thanks very much James it is exactly what I wished!!! This graphics tells us exactly what we can expect or not!!

I think that curve is for Advanced LIGO , Standard LIGO is about one order of magintude less sensitive.
Yes, I don't think we need to start rethinking gravitational wave theory just yet, it's not too surprising that nothing has been detected by LIGO so far. Lets wait for Advanced LIGO first (2009)

James

Yes, no need yet to rethink the gravitationnal wave theory, as LIGO today is only able to detect rare events, mainly neutron stars and black hole coalescence, and only the stronger.

Black holes coalescence is, I think, something very well understood (in the context of General realtivity. But even without relativity we can expect that star-sized masses spiraling a high speed will produce strong gravitationnal effects.). Neutron star coalescence and super nova core collapse are slightly less understood (especially SN core coalescence may be highly disordered and unsymmetrical) but the theory is still reliable. So it is expectable that we detect some events before 2009, and only some years after this date, if we detect nothing, the gravitationnal wave theory is at risk.