By Laura Geggel, Senior
Writer | April 19, 2018 03:23pm ET
Bizarre data glitches have set
gravitational-wave scientists — and a conspiracy of ravens — all aflutter.
A series of weird blips in the
data, known as short-duration bursts, raised the suspicions of physicists at
the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Hanford
Observatory, in eastern Washington. Were they communications from alien beings?
The work of nefarious data scramblers? Or previously unknown physics?
It turns out it was none of the
above.
Rather, the blips came from a
conspiracy of thirsty ravens that were pecking at ice on pipes leading into the
facility, the researchers announced on April 16 at an American Physical Society
meeting in Columbus, Ohio, according
to their abstract.
The discovery came about after
the physicists decided to increase the sensitivity of the advanced LIGO at the
Hanford Observatory, one of two facilities in the United States (the other is
in Livingston, Louisiana) that detects gravitational waves.
Gravitational waves have been in
the news in recent years. Albert Einstein predicted that these ripples in
space-time would form when massive objects in the universe collided. Thanks to
data collected by the observatories in Washington and Louisiana, physicists
directly detected gravitational waves for the first time in September 2015, and
three of them won the
Nobel Prize in physics for this discovery in 2017.
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