Artificial intelligence! This is good stuff because it can help astronomers find gravitational waves

Hey, HAL, can you help us find black hole impacts?

Scientific visualization of numerical relativity simulations depicting the coincidence of two black holes colliding and the binary black hole merger GW170814. (Image credit: Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, Visualization and Data Analysis Group [Janet Knowles, Joseph Insley, Victor Mateevitsi, Silvio Rizzi])

As scientists search the universe for elusive gravitational waves, a new tool may enhance their discoveries: artificial intelligence.

Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time that occur when massive objects are accelerated or disturbed, such as when a black hole and a neutron star collide. Using Albert Einstein's theory, researchers first discovered gravitational waves in 2015 with the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), proving their existence. Now, six years later, we have detected at least 50 gravitational waves.

But as they continue to detect gravitational waves, some scientists think they could notice them sooner and therefore detect them more often if they used AI. In a new study, researchers show how using supercomputers and AI could make this possible.

“In this study, we combined the power of AI and supercomputers to help solve timely and relevant big data experiments. We are now not only confirming that AI can provide new solutions to grand challenges, but also making AI research fully reproducible,” said Eliu Huerta, a computer scientist at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory who led the study with partners from Argonne, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NVIDIA and IBM, in a research paper.

In this new study, the team developed an AI framework that they hope to apply to faster, more scalable and reproducible gravitational wave detection. According to the same report, the team believes that this framework is faster than existing methods and only requires the most basic and cheap GPUs to process LIGO data. For reference: This type of GPU is commonly used in video game systems.

With the AI ​​framework, the team processed a month's worth of LIGO data in 2017 in less than seven minutes and identified all four gravitational wave signals generated by black hole mergers. In the same report, these four signals had already been defined by scientists.

“As a computer scientist, what excites me most about this project is that with the right tools, AI methods can become a very natural part of scientific work, allowing them to get their work done faster and better, augmenting rather than replacing human intelligence,” said Ian Foster, director of Argonne’s Data Science and Learning Division, in the same report.

Related knowledge

A black hole is a super-hidden area in the universe. No particles, electromagnetic rays, or light can escape. General relativity proves that a sufficiently dense mass can distort space-time to form a black hole. The boundary where there is no escape is called the event horizon. Although it has a huge impact on the fate and environment of objects passing through it, according to general relativity, it has no fixed detectable characteristics. In many ways, a black hole looks like an ideal black body that does not reflect any light.

Furthermore, quantum field theory in curved spacetime predicts that the event horizon emits Hawking rays, whose spectrum is the same as that of a black body, whose mass is inversely proportional to its temperature. For stellar black holes, this temperature is about 1/100 million Kelvin, making it essentially impossible to observe them directly.

In general relativity, gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime. When a stone is thrown into a pond, ripples are generated on the surface of the pond, which propagate outward from the point where the stone enters the water. When a massive object moves with acceleration, ripples are also generated in spacetime, which propagate outward from the position of the massive object. These ripples in spacetime are gravitational waves[1][2]. Since general relativity limits the propagation speed of gravitational interactions to the speed of light, the induction of gravity between two cosmic objects will produce gravitational waves. We can imagine that when a heavy ball is placed on a plane and moves, the spacetime distortion wave caused by the plane will take some time to spread out before affecting another ball in the distance. In contrast, the interaction in Newton's theory of gravity propagates at infinite speed, so gravitational waves do not exist under this theory[3].

BY: Chelsea Gohd

FY: ISHUCA · Willow

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