With the discovery, on 11 February, waves gravitational, astronomy has entered a completely new era that requires new instruments. The European Space Agency (ESA) has just reported that the first of these instruments is not only in position but works much better than expected
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What is LISA Pathfinder?
This is an experimental spacecraft that ESA launched on December 3, 2015 and She reached their destination six weeks later. That destiny is the L1 Lagrange point, 1.5 million kilometers from our planet toward the sun. It is an orbital distance where the gravitational pull of the Sun and Earth (much closer) cancel each other out, so that the object located at the neutral point has the same orbital period as the Earth.
LISA Pathfinder began checking their systems on 13 January 2016. After checking that everything worked properly, the proper scientific mission began on March 1. Its results were announced on 7 June 2016.
What experiment is carrying out
Inside the LISA Pathfinder there are two identical cameras to 38cm from one another?. Inside each float two cubes made from an alloy of platinum and gold. Each cube measures 46 mm side and weighs 1.9 kilos. The chamber is formed by a series of sensors attached to external impellers maintaining the cubes in a permanent state of free fall, without mechanical contact with the chamber walls. Occasionally, a pulse system maintains stable ultraviolet light cubes within the chamber. At the same time, the chamber walls insulate cubes of any external disturbance as the solar wind, cosmic radiation or light of our own star. Two laser interferometers are responsible for measuring the distance from one bucket to another within their chambers.
What measures exactly this system
A neutral gravitational point in space and two objects floating without any? external disturbance. The reader already warned guess that the LISA Pathfinder mission has to do with gravity, and more specifically with gravitational waves. The probe operates in a similar manner as does the LIGO observatory discovered gravitational waves last February 11 way. In an environment as isolated as this, any movement in the buckets not caused by the apparatus itself should be caused by a gravitational wave.
What has been the achievement?
LISA Pathfinder can not detect gravitational waves by itself. Its hubs are too close to each other. The success of the mission is that the device works perfectly. Floating cubes remain completely still and the system is capable of detecting its position relative to a lower accuracy than the diameter of an atom. Martin Hewitson, Albert Einstein Institute Institute and the University of Leibniz explains that it is accurate to five times higher than that expected for that instrument. The only disturbance that researchers have found are sporadic particles are the residual gas remaining in the chamber and they are trying to remove.
What now
The success of LISA Pathfinder supposed immediate green light to LISA (LaserInterferometer Space Antenna) program, a project that aims to deploy three probes as Pathfinder for 2034. Combined, these probes will form a giant triangular antenna of a million kilometers across whose objective is to measure gravitational waves with a precision never seen before. In other words, the scientific community will have access to data from a space observatory that would be impossible to build on Earth.
Why is it so important?
predicted by Einstein in his general theory of relativity, gravitational waves are disturbances in space-time caused by the acceleration of objects with mass. So far, we have observed the universe only through the electromagnetic spectrum. The study of gravitational waves is by putting an analogy, like going to see an image in black and white to see it in full color. The data we receive from instrumental as LISA not only allow us to better understand cosmic phenomena such as black holes but also possibly unravel the mysteries of gravity and achieve advances in physics that allow us to travel through space beyond our System Solar. [Physical Review Letters via ESA]
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