LIGO's Getting Its Upgrades. What's Next? | Q&A 426

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]What's going on with LIGO? Which fictional spaceship is the most realistic? How will astronauts protect themselves during longtime flights? And Q&A plus, what evidence will remain if humanity vanishes tomorrow? All this and more in this question show. It's time for the question show. Your questions, my answers, as always, wherever you are across my channel. If a question pops in your brain, just write it down. I'll gather them up and I will answer them here. All right, let's get into the questions. Hooves one LIGO upgrades.

[00:00:27]Yes, LIGO is the laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory. There's two facilities in the United States. One is in Washington and one is in Louisiana. And these are designed to measure gravitational waves as they pass through the Earth. And they finished their most recent observing run and now they're taking a break to do upgrades on the optics. And originally the plan was to keep LIGO offline probably for the better part of a year, year and a half while they make all these upgrades and increase the sensitivity and make better mirrors and come up with new techniques for squeezing the light and the quantum information to get even more measurements of gravitational waves. But V Rubin came online and so the plan now is to bring LIGO back operational relatively quickly within just a couple of months so that it can then participate in Ver Rubin discoveries either detect gravitational waves so that then Reuben can do following observations or vice versa where Reuben detects some kind of event and do we see the signal in the LIGO data And so they're going to probably participate with Reuben into 2027 and then once they've got a baseline for that, they're going to shut the system down and make those upgrades. But I know that there was a recent video about LIGO. Oh, I forget her name. Anyway, there's a journalist who just did a tour of of LIGO. And I would love to go to LIGO.

[00:02:04]That would be great. You know, I'm I'm in British Columbia. Washington is just across the border and I would love to see LIGO in person. Uh or CERN, that'd be cool, too. James Macintosh, aren't there a couple more LIOS? So, there's two other facilities. One is called Virgo, which is the European version of LIGO. And then there's Kaga, which is a Japanese observatory. Those aren't as sensitive as the LIGO, but between the four of them, you get this much better view of gravitational waves because now you've got four different perspectives and you can detect in three dimensions where the gravitational waves are coming from. Before when you just had LIGO, we just had two points of measurement. Then you would you could know roughly which hemisphere the gravitational wave was coming from like like it came from the left or it came from the right. But once you add Kagra and Virgo, now we're getting perfect three-dimensional view of the sky. We know that it came from this tiny little spot in the sky. Now, the Virgo and Kagra aren't as sensitive as LIGO. There are gravitational waves that only LIGO can detect, but you've got this great collaboration between all of these big gravitational wave observatories so that they're developing techniques in one and then utilizing those techniques with the other observatories to to for for them all to improve. And as new gravitational wave observatories are installed, it should just continue on this. There's the Einstein telescope. There's the cosmic explorer which is going to be this 40 kilometer arm version of a gravitational wave observatory. So like the LIGO ones are 10 kilometers long and so the the cosmic explorer will be 40 I think and so there's a bunch more gravitational wave observatories. They just keep adding to the network as they get built.

[00:03:54]Tid Krauss what is the astronaut protection for long-term use like to Mars or the moon longtime habitation. So there is no protection for astronauts on a long duration space flight. If you're going to send astronauts to the moon, you check the weather. You try to go to the moon at a time when there isn't a lot of activity on the sun. You know, we're still just a little bit past solar maximum. So the Aremis 2 mission is a little, you know, little dicey, but it was fine. Once you're at the moon, then you put your base in a place where you are protected from space radiation. You can either just like go into a lava tube, you can dig underground, cover your inflatable base with a meter of regalith, and that will protect you from all of the radiation in space. And then astronauts will just have to spend their time, as much of their time as possible protected by this radiation shield. But if you're going to go to Mars, then it's a big problem. Um, you know, because you're always trying to balance the weight of your spacecraft. The lighter your spacecraft, the less propellant that's required to get you to your destination. And if you're going to put a meter of ice or um, regalith around your spaceship, you're adding thousands of tons to the weight of your spaceship.

[00:05:17]And then you're going to need more propellant. And then that's going to require more shielding. So the Orion capsule, they had policies, they had plans for if there was a solar storm, which is that the astronauts would build a fort inside the Orion capsule that they would gather together all of their supplies, all of their water, all of their equipment, their electronics, everything they've got, and they would go and hide out in the best protected component of the capsule. and they would have this uh igloo, this fort built of their densest supplies trying to protect them from the radiation. That works if it's a one-time event. If it's a solar storm, solar storm is passing through, you just want to make sure you're okay for an hour while the solar storm is passing through and then you dismantle your fort and then go back to what you're doing. But if you're going to Mars, it's not just the risks of solar storms. I mean you you are at you know you have 9 months that you are on your way to Mars and there's a chance that a solar storm is going to come through but there is the just the ongoing radiation that comes from cosmic rays. They're going to pass right through your fort. And so on average astronauts on this long-term journey will receive about 200 times as much radiation as a person who's down on the surface of the earth. And the consequence is that you will experience higher rates of cancer down the road. As these cosmic rays pass through your body, they are liberating atoms out of your DNA and then those DNA can go on to mutate uh when as they split and you can you can have cancer. There just is no strategy for this. We have no way like you can have a little bit more shielding but the little bit more shielding is going to require weight. There is some really interesting research that's being done. Uh there was a paper that we reported on on Universe Today about crystals that can be used to maybe direct uh cosmic rays. So there's there's different ideas, but so far none of these are at the point where you can reduce the risk entirely of a deep space mission. Astronauts going to Mars are going to have higher rates of cancer when they come home. And that's just the reality.

[00:07:37]>> It's time to shout out our new patrons of the $5 level and above. Benson Walker, Andrea Padretti, H Highlelesbeck, Bill Anderson, Oscar Gonzalez, Senior Spacer, Travis, Abraa Daniel, Jeff Cen, and Gary Shaw. Join our community at patreon.com/universe.

[00:07:52]Today, do we have a spacecraft in deep space watching the Earth as it transits in front of the sun so we can learn how to remove the noise when checking exoplanet atmospheres? So, very close. Uh there's actually a new telescope that was installed at the Paranol Observatory in Chile and this is one of the sites for the European Southern Observatory and they have this solar telescope that is watching the sun and is measuring the variability of the sun, all of the little flares and all the little granules and trying to understand how that influences the observations of exoplanets going around their stars. So what you're proposing is essentially exactly a new telescope. They just saw first light like a month ago for this exact job. So the idea that occurred to you has occurred to the astronomers and they actually built the telescope to do this. And so after a couple of years of doing all of these observations of the sun, they'll have a much better understanding of what our star does and how it would pollute observations of planetary transits. The other thing that's great is there's this spacecraft called the ProRBA 3 satellite. This is by the European Space Agency and it produces artificial eclipses. So you've got this satellite and then you've got this occultter that they fly in formation and then the occultter goes in front of the sun and perfectly blocks it. Much better than when the moon blocks the sun during an eclipse. like there's no mountains on the side of this occultter and so it perfectly blocks the sun and then astronomers can view the corona around the sun and it does like one of these every single day or two of them every single day and the eclipses last for much longer than real eclipses last and so there is a spacecraft right now out of space that is producing hours and hours of eclipse footage that we just can't get from the earth which is really cool and so that will also feed into so not just what we see on the surface of the sun but the environment the atmosphere around the sun and how that will influence our observations of exoplanets. Like in general when astronomers go into one of these new fields they sort of they don't realize I mean all scientists really they don't realize how complicated how difficult how many variables there are going to be they only reveal themselves once you're neck deep in the work and so now turns out stellar pollution huge problem and now they're coming up with the solutions observations of the sun it's called the poet instrument observations of the corona with the proba 3 satellite trying to tease out what is the influence of the star compared to the what you would be seeing with the exoplanet atmospheres. Page Potter, what fictional spaceship design feels the most realistic? Probably the Russenante from the Expanse. Uh, you know, the Expanse, we actually just did a four-part series on Astronomycast about different the science of different franchises. And so we did Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, and The Expanse.

[00:10:58]And with all of the others, it was very much like, here's the magical handwaving technology that allows you to go faster than the speed of light. And here's the magical handwaving technology that allows you to teleport. Here's the magical handwaving technology that allows you to have deflector shields around your spacecraft. But in The Expanse, it was like, here's the science. Here's the science of of why this thing works. And and like the one mcguffin, the one thing that they did in the expanse is they just assumed that there was going to be some kind of compact fusion reactor that would allow you to accelerate and get at 1g to experience gravity while your spacecraft is accelerating and then you flip your spacecraft around and you decelerate at 1g. Like that's a ludicrous amount of propulsion. We don't have spacecraft that can do that. We can't even wrap our minds around spacecraft that are capable of producing that kind of of thrust. But once you do that, like once you are willing to see that, then everything else is seems very realistic. You know, the way the missiles fire, little mini fusion rockets on them, they go after their targets. that all of the battles are done in this sort of Newtonian physics way. That you've got point defense weapons that are firing at missiles as they're getting close to you. Everything in the expanse just feels really solid that there are no shields, right? Yeah. It's such a great show and it just feels all so realistic and great. I love the expanse. I mean, you know, before I would have said like expanse and for all mankind, but for all mankind is kind of slipping. So, the expanse is the finest space science fiction show ever made. And it it breaks my heart that they stopped at season six or whatever and they haven't done the full series of books. Like, Bezos, finish this.

[00:12:57]This is ridiculous.

[00:12:59]Finish the expanse. Did you know that you can watch the same video with no ads and get a bonus question over on Patreon completely for free? We call it Q&A Plus. This week's bonus question, what evidence will remain if humanity vanishes tomorrow? And I'll put a link in the show notes. All right, those are all the questions that we had this week.

[00:13:15]Thank you everyone who ask your questions in the YouTube comments.

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[00:13:32]Uh but people have been asking why don't I film outside anymore and uh so I'm about to explain that in a second, but first I'd like to thank our patrons.

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[00:14:10]So, here's that question. James FC Russell asks, "Are you ever going to go back into that forest, or was it really just a green screen all along?" So, old school followers of the channel remember a time when we used to record all of our episodes out in the Vancouver Island forest. And that was great and it was sort of very cool background, very different, made our channel very different from other stuff. But the problem is, and you're probably experiencing it right now as I'm standing out in the street in Japan, how uh there's a lot of ambient noise. And so we would have to stop as airplanes and leaf blowers and chainsaws and trucks were going by uh that it was sort of a big production every time. We wanted to just go out into the forest and set up and be able to record. And we just wanted something more streamlined.

[00:14:54]And so when we built our new house, we put a room for a studio in the house.

[00:14:59]And so now I could just flick a switch, lights are on, the walls are insulated, I can control all the lighting, the sound, the video, and so I can make a lot more content. And that was really the thing you're most interested in. You could either have two 3 minute videos a week or hours and hours of the kind of content that I'm now producing. So like that's the price. Now, I still want to be able to go back into the forest and I've got plans on ways to sort of make it more convenient. Maybe like a build a studio in the forest that I can go and set up in. That would be really cool.

[00:15:29]Uh, that's still sort of in my dream, but for now, uh, unless I'm on the road, you'll probably see me in my standard studio.