Could somebody explain what this discovery means for science? Are there any functional applications for this?
Note that I'm more of an innovator than a scientist, so I always like to think about applications for new scientific discoveries.
Note that I'm more of an innovator than a scientist, so I always like to think about applications for new scientific discoveries.
Hard to say what the practical applications will be, but it's akin to asking Galileo what the practical applications of a telescope are. There probably aren't any if you're a 17th-century merchant or something, but a few decades down the line…
If you read the article you would see that they expect to see events daily within a few years. It will become similar to optical observations with telescopes.
When 2 neutron stars circle each other, they'll start sending out gravitational waves. This will start to occur centuries before they collide, but they increase exponentially until the collision happens. Today they cross the detection threshold a few minutes before the actual collision, depending on their size. If we can get that up to a few hours or a few weeks we can use this to point every telescope in the world in the right direction before the flash of the collision happens.
So an immediate application is simple : it gives us advance warnings of large events in the cosmos. This means a lot of instruments dedicated to studying huge-energy events no longer has to look at the entire night sky, or get lucky, but we can actually get a signal before they happen.
In theory, if we can get the instruments accurate enough, we should be able to detect even smaller events like a supernova. A gravitational wave should be generated a few hours before the flash.