ASTR 200 : Lecture 31 More Gravity: Tides, GR, and Gravitational Waves 1
Topic One : Tides Differential tidal forces on the Earth. 2
How do tides work???? Think about 3 billiard balls sitting in space They fall towards the planet. The red ball accelerates more GM/r 2 3
How do tides work???? Now imagine sitting on the center ball...! What do you see? The two others are PUSHED AWAY from you! Weird! Gravity looks repulsive? How is this possible? Because you are in an accelerating reference frame. 4
The Moon does the same thing to Earth's surface - Replace the billiard balls with locations on the Earth's surface. - The near and far points on the Earth seem to bulge away from the center! - 5 Because Earth's oceans are less rigid, the water responds to this `tidal acceleration' the most.
There are 2 high tides per day Why? Because the Earth 'turns under' the Moon. To Moon 6
But tides are a completely general concept. It's just the gradient (rate of change) of the gravitational field Because gravity goes as 1/r2...the rate of change of the gravitational force (which is what we call the `tidal force' Ft ) goes as 1/r3 7
The standard thought experiment: falling into a black hole The normal gravitational acceleration you feel is g ~ 10 m/s2 Turn the Sun into its Rsch ~ 3 km black hole, and you are 100 km from the singularity. What is the tidal acceleration over your height of ~ 2m? It's (2GM/r3)dr ~ 2(10-10m3kg-1s-2)(2x1030kg)(2m)/(105m)3~106 m/s2 ~105 g So your head and feet will separate rather violently... 8
Tidal disruption of unlucky passing objects is probably how supermassive black holes grow Tides distort star Some material drawn off (core of star might escape) Self-interacting material dissipates energy and settles into accretion disk Accretion disk friction results in mass being fed below event horizon; some small amount fueling a highly energetic AGN, till mass consumed 9
Topic Two : More General Relativity A page from Einstein's `Zurich Notebooks' His first usage of the curvature tensors 10
The metric tensor gμν in Einstein's field equations Describes curvature of spacetime Cosmological constant Describes where the matter is Example: Spacetime metric tensor for spherical polar coordinates in a flat spacetime 11
The Schwarzchild metric Describes the geometry of spacetime where one mass M exists The first exact solution to the field equations Note interesting things happen as r 0 and r 2GM/c2 12
The metric tensor gμν in Einstein's field equations Describes curvature of spacetime Cosmological constant Together these make Gμν the Einstein tensor 13 Describes where the matter is
s 12 10 8 Column 1 Column 2 Column 3 6 4 2 0 Row 1 14 Row 2 Row 3 Row 4
Motion in curved space time The trajectories are just 'locally straight' (geodesics) 15
The Schwarzchild metric gives elliptical planetary orbits - (in the 'weak field limit' where r always >> Rsch) 16
The 'non-newtonian' effects on the motion thus appear first for objects as close as possible to the Schwarzchild radius Mercury in our solar system A planetary orbit in GR does not precisely close back upon itself The net result is that the short-term `elliptical orbit' has its major axis slowly rotate, so the direction pointing to its perihelion advances slowly This was measured at the start of the 20th century and needed a resolution. GR provided the solution. 17
Topic Three : Gravitational Waves 18
Gravitational Waves In newtonian physics, 'force' is some pull that happens between massive objects, and the force happens infinitely fast In general relativity, 'force' is just provided by the curvature of space time, and accelerating mass distributions 'send out' their changing positions as gravitational waves 19
Gravitational Waves The waves travel as distortions in the metric, and propagate at the speed of light even though they are NOT electromagnetic radiation A very important example of a system that generates gravitational waves (or gravitational 'radiation') is a pair of orbiting massive objects Because the gravitational waves DO carry mass-energy, the orbital energy of the binary (and hence orbital semimajor axis) will decrease. Recall from an earlier lecture that this orbital period decay of the double pulsar was detected and basically confirmed GR but the gravitational waves were NOT directly detected. 20
What detectable signal do gravity waves generate? Because of the way the distortion works, as a gravity wave passes a point in space, one spatial axis is contracted, and the perpendicular axis is stretched. This then reverses a half wave later. Because the metric is changing, the distance between two points will change, by a small amount. Thus, detection can be done by constantly measuring the distance between two points and looking for a periodic oscillation The challenge is that the distortion is less than 1 part in 1020... 21
This feat is accomplished using interference of lasers Send a laser beam in two orthogonal directions by splitting the light, and then recombine and look for fringes 22
The LIGO detectors (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) The two arms are 4 km in length. Each arm holds a 1-m diameter vacuum tube through which the light beam travels Even with this, the distances change by only 10-18 m (!) Success (after >30 years of work) resulted in the Nobel Prize in physics 23
The kind of signal The known (thus expected) shape of the signal was computed in advance by supercomputers solving the field equations. Seen in 2 detectors No doubt here... super convincing The rising frequency is caused by the decreasing orbital period in the final merger stage 24
Double black hole merger This signal is from two black holes that are spiraling toward each other as they emit copious amounts of gravitational waves When their event horizons touch they merge and become one larger BH The details in the signal give the BH masses before and after the merger 25
The first few events: Mergers of two 'stellar remnant' black holes. Note the distances are gigaparsec scale... 26
More Recently, a Neutron Star binary merger Two space-based gamma-ray telescopes recorded a signal ~2 seconds later 27
More details on the binary neutron star merger - Two neutron stars with a total mass of ~3 solar masses - The remnant object has 1.2 solar masses - A gamma-ray burst was observed 2 seconds after the merger - A new optical source was spotted in the outskirts of a known galaxy, that faded over a week 28
29
The Mass-Energy Budget of the Merger 62 Solar masses 36 Solar masses 29 Solar masses 30 36+29 = 65...
This is a new `type' of astronomy! Gravitational waves do NOT get absorbed, they propagate away at c (getting weaker as time goes one) but pass through everything The current LIGO interferometers detect events at ~100 Hz, from inspiraling binaries of two black holes or two neutron stars Future space interferometers (LISA) can detect the lowerfrequency mergers of super-massive black holes (expected to be much rarer) 32
Even better: use the travel time to many PULSARS as a giant detector The NANO-Grav project would use radio telescopes to monitor many pulsars and detect the passage of very long-period gravitational waves 33