What are Dark Sirens?

A team of scientists have recently found a way to solve cosmological tensions through dark sirens.

What are Dark Sirens?

The Dark Sirens are nothing but gravitational waves from neutron stars or black holes. The Dark sirens can be picked up by gravitational wave detector but not by ordinary telescopes.

What are the Cosmological tensions that can be solved through Dark Sirens?

The Cosmologists have been facing the crisis that the universe is expanding, and it cannot be deciphered how fast it is moving away. This is mainly because, different ways of measuring Hubble’s constant provide different results.

Hubble Constant in simple terms

When the Universe is moving away from the earth, the relationship between speed and distance between the earth and the universe is called Hubble Constant. Here Universe can be any celestial body, a star, or a black hole. The Constant has been named after Edwin Hubble who first calculated the value of Hubble Constant in 1920.

How will Dark Sirens solve Cosmological crisis?

When massive neutron stars or black holes smash together they release huge amount of energy sending out gravitational waves. The LASER Inferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) has been listening to such massive crashes since 2015. Based on the sound heard, LIGO will help the scientists calculate how far they happened.

Recently, the discovery of dozens of Quasars have also given hope of determining Hubble’s constant.

Way Forward

The LIGO detectors are expected to get an upgrade over the next five years. The European and the US facilities were recently joined by the Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector in Japan. Also, an Indian detector is to go online in 2024. With these advancements, the scientists will be able to pinpoint where exactly did the Dark Siren crash happen. And such predictions will be four hundred times better than the current detections.

Month: Current Affairs - April, 2021