Measuring the speed of gravitational wave propagation - Einstein appears to be correct again

ack

VIP/Donor & WBF Founding Member
May 6, 2010
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Recall the recent gravitational-wave event caused by colliding neutron stars, which also emitted light. That has enabled scientists to measure the propagation velocity of gravitational waves to a very accurate degree, and so close to the speed of light, as Einstein had predicted

https://phys.org/news/2017-11-physicists-rapid-bounding-gravity.html

Just two days later (and after the physicists mentioned above wrote their paper), another paper was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations, whose authors are affiliated with nearly 200 institutions around the world. By using data from the gravitational waves emitted by a binary neutron star merger detected in August, they were able to constrain the difference between the speed of gravity and the speed of light to between -3 x 10-15 and 7 x 10-16 times the speed of light.
 

ack

VIP/Donor & WBF Founding Member
May 6, 2010
6,774
1,198
580
Boston, MA
I want to be able to come back to this one day, so I am citing the two recent research papers:

First, the much less accurate one: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.161102
Using a Bayesian approach that combines the first three gravitational wave detections reported by the LIGO Scientific and Virgo Collaborations we constrain the gravitational waves propagation speed cgw to the 90% credible interval 0.55c<cgw<1.42c, where c is the speed of light in vacuum.

And the much more accurate one: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aa920c
The association of GW170817 and GRB 170817A provides new insight into fundamental physics and the origin of short GRBs. We use the observed time delay of
between GRB 170817A and GW170817 to: (i) constrain the difference between the speed of gravity and the speed of light to be between
and
times the speed of light
, (ii) place new bounds on the violation of Lorentz invariance, (iii) present a new test of the equivalence principle by constraining the Shapiro delay between gravitational and electromagnetic radiation.
 

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