It is argued that the short bursts of gravitational radiation which Weber reports most probably arise from the gravitational collapse of a body of stellar mass or the capture of one collapsed object by another. In both cases the bulk of the energy would be emitted in a burst lasting about a millisecond, during which the Riemann tensor would change sign from one to three times. The signal-to-noise problem for the detection of such bursts is discussed, and it is shown that by observing fluctuations in the phase or amplitude of the Brownian oscillations of a quadrupole antenna one can detect bursts which impart to the system an energy of a small fraction of $\mathrm{kT}$. Applied to Weber's antenna, this method could improve the sensitivity for reliable detection by a factor of about 12. However, by using an antenna of the same physical dimensions but with a much tighter electromechanical coupling, one could obtain an improvement by a factor of up to 250. The tighter coupling would also enable one to determine the time of arrival of the bursts to within a millisecond. Such time resolution would make it possible to verify that the radiation was propagating with the velocity of light and to determine the direction of the source.

• Received 30 November 1970

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.4.2191

This article appears in the following collection:

The Work of Stephen Hawking in Physical Review

To mark the passing of Stephen Hawking, we gathered together his 55 papers in Physical Review D and Physical Review Letters. They probe the edges of space and time, from "Black holes and thermodynamics” to "Wave function of the Universe."