Listening for the cosmic symphony: New SU supercomputer will help scientists listen for black holes

Scientists hope that a new supercomputer being built by Syracuse University's Department of Physics may help them identify the sound of a celestial black hole. The supercomputer, dubbed SUGAR (SU Gravitational and Relativity Cluster), will soon receive massive amounts of data from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) that was collected over a two-year period at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

Duncan Brown, assistant professor of physics and member of SU's Gravitational Wave Group, is assembling SUGAR. The department's Gravitational Wave Group is also part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), a worldwide initiative to detect gravitational waves. Brown worked on the LIGO project at Caltech before coming to SU last August.

Gravitational waves are produced by violent events in the distant universe, such as the collision of black holes or explosions of supernovas. The waves radiate across the universe at the speed of light. While Albert Einstein predicted the existence of these waves in 1916 in his general theory of relativity, it has taken decades to develop the technology to detect them. Construction of the LIGO detectors in Hanford, Wash., and Livingston, La., was completed in 2005. Scientists recently concluded a two-year "science run" of the detectors and are now searching the data for these waves. LSC scientists will be analyzing this data while the sensitivity of the detectors is being improved. Detectors have also been built in France, Germany, Italy and Japan.

Before they can isolate the sound of a black hole from the LIGO data, the scientists must figure out what a black hole sounds like. That's where Einstein's theories come in. Working with colleagues from the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) project, Brown will use SUGAR and Einstein's equations to create models of gravitational wave patterns from the collision of two black holes. SXS is a collaborative project with Caltech and Cornell University.

Black holes are massive gravitational fields in the universe that result from the collapse of giant stars. Because black holes absorb light, they cannot be studied using telescopes or other instruments that rely on light waves. However, scientists believe they can learn more about black holes by listening for their gravitational waves.

"Looking for gravitational waves is like listening to the universe," Brown says. "Different kinds of events produce different wave patterns. We want to try to extract a wave pattern -- a special sound -- that matches our model from all of the noise in the LIGO data."

It takes massive amounts of computer power and data storage capacity to analyze the data against the gravitational wave models Duncan and his colleagues built. SUGAR is a collection of 80 computers, packing 320 CPUs of power and 640 Gigabytes of random access memory. SUGAR also has 96 terabytes of disk space on which to store the LIGO data.

It also takes a dedicated, high-speed fiber-optic network to transfer the data between Caltech and SU. To accomplish that, SU's Information Technology and Services (ITS) collaborated with NYSERNet to build a special pathway for the LIGO data on the high-speed fiber optic network that crisscrosses the United States. The one-gigabit pathway begins in the Physics Building and traverses SU's fiber-optic network to Machinery Hall and then to a network facility in downtown Syracuse, which the University shares with NYSERNet. From there, the pathway connects to NYSERNet's fiber-optic network and goes to New York City. In New York City, the pathway switches to the Internet2 high-speed network and traverses the country, ending in a computer room in Caltech.

Both the supercomputer and the high-speed network are expected to be up and running by the end of February. Once the data is transferred to SU from Caltech, Brown and his LSC colleagues will begin to listen to the "cosmic symphony." "Gravitational waves can teach us much about what is out there in the universe," Brown says. "We've never looked at Einstein's theory in this way."

LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation and operated by Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Source: Syracuse University

Related stories:

Einstein was right: Unique stellar system provides 'laboratory' for testing relativity
Researchers at McGill University's Department of Physics – along with colleagues from several countries – have confirmed a long-held prediction of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, via observations of a binary-pulsar star system. Their results will be published July 3 in the journal Science.
Radio telescopes reveal unseen galactic cannibalism
Mystery of black hole 'feeding' resolved
Radio-telescope images have revealed previously-unseen galactic cannibalism -- a triggering event that leads to feeding frenzies by gigantic black holes at the cores of galaxies. Astronomers have long suspected that the extra-bright cores of spiral galaxies called Seyfert galaxies are powered by supermassive black holes consuming material. However, they could not see how the material is started on its journey toward the black hole.
Can you hear black holes collide?
A team of gravitational-wave researchers from four universities has been selected to exhibit at the prestigious Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition.
'Squeezed' Light May Improve Gravitational Wave Detectors
A research collaboration has taken steps toward improving the sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors, devices designed to measure distance changes as minute as one-thousandth the diameter of a proton. Scientists hope these detectors can one day further verify Einstein's theory of general relativity and even open a new window into the strange workings of the universe.
Black hole expelled from its parent galaxy
By an enormous burst of gravitational waves that accompanies the merger of two black holes the newly formed black hole was ejected from its galaxy. This extreme ejection event, which had been predicted by theorists, has now been observed in nature for the first time. The team led by Stefanie Komossa from the Max Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) have thereby opened a new window into observational astrophysics.
Radio telescope reveals secrets of massive black hole
At the cores of many galaxies, supermassive black holes expel powerful jets of particles at nearly the speed of light. Just how they perform this feat has long been one of the mysteries of astrophysics.
Team simulates first merger of 3 black holes on a supercomputer
The same team of astrophysicists that cracked the computer code simulating two black holes crashing and merging together has now, for the first time, caused a three-black-hole collision.
The world's lowest noise laser: Researchers outsmart quantum physics
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics and Leibniz University of Hanover have produced a laser beam of especially high quality. In doing so, they have achieved a new world record in the control of photons by precisely placing the photons in a specific order.

News discussion:

Physics news