This week, I thought I'd talk about some of the research I've been doing. Lately I've been working on a suite of tools called LALBarycenter. LAL is the LIGO Analysis Library, and Barycenter refers to the solar system's center of mass, the point around which the sun and all the planets revolve. Contrary to popular belief, the sun is not quite the center of our solar system:
Calculating the positions of everything in the solar system and their effect on the incoming signal can be time-consuming, so we were interested in finding a faster, approximate method.
One of the important functions of this set of tools is to determine the time at which a signal was emitted from a source given its position relative to the Earth at the time it was detected. This seems like it would be as simple as dividing the distance by the speed of light, but it's more complicated than that, thanks to something called the
Shapiro delay.
As I described in my
RELATE video, massive objects bend space and time around them. That means that if a signal passes near the sun, it can end up traveling a longer distance:
Because our measurements are so precise, we have to keep track of every deviation. My hope is push the calculation to the edge of the required accuracy, while cutting down on the processing requirements.
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