Scientists have attempted to find gravitational waves with near-inertial frequencies directly in the Earth’s atmosphere. However, they encountered that models of our planet’s gas envelope were not accurate enough.
Gravitational waves in the Earth’s atmosphere
Scientists continue to search for gravitational waves. And recently, a revolutionary way of searching for them unexpectedly revealed a lack of knowledge in a completely different field. The study in which this was found was conducted by experts from the Information and Systems Research Organization.
It occurred to them that a gravitational wave, for example, from the merger of neutron stars is just a fluctuation of space, which is invisible in itself, but which passes absolutely through all the media that exist on Earth, and according to their anomalous behavior we can judge that something like that really passes through them.
So, they thought they could use even the Earth’s atmosphere for this, where they could cause anomalous turbulence and weather changes. To do this, they investigated meridional winds in Antarctica. This was done both with the help of sensors on board the balloon and with the help of PANSY radar, which operates at one of the Antarctic stations.
Inaccurate models
At first glance, the study was not very successful. After all, gravitational waves with frequencies that are close to the inertial ones could not be unambiguously detected. However, the reason why the study conducted from January through February 2022 did not reach its goal in itself was interesting.
The atmosphere is a highly unstable system, something is happening in it all the time. Therefore, in order to detect gravitational waves there, we should first exclude from the picture all phenomena caused by terrestrial or ordinary cosmic events.
And exactly these models, which were considered reliable enough, turned out to be too inaccurate to calculate gravitational waves by deviation from them. That is, the study identified their imperfections.
According to phys.org
