Interference from human activity has always been a problem for astronomical observations. Radio -Astronomy is sadly known for its sensitivity to unintentional interference – that is why are the radio monitoring zones near telescopes, where it is forbidden to use mobile phones. Gravity-wave astronomy suffers from this even more-and it is unclear whether there is something to do with it.

These are the conclusions of the physicist Red Essis from the University of Toronto. The results of his study entitled “Can Ligo find a transition to summer time” are posted on the preprint server arXiv.

The first sentence, the author answers the question in the heading: “Yes, maybe.” The answer, at first glance, seems paradoxical. The transition to summer time is an artificial human invention, in which not even all countries participate – how can it affect gravitational waves from the confluence of black holes in billions of light years from the Earth?

Can’t. And on LIGO detectors – quite. Assik studied this influence. To do this, he took advantage of the so -called “inject campaigns” – intentionally introducing interference into the signals of detectors. Two injecting campaigns used by the scientist belong to the third observation session (from 2019 to 2020) and the initial part of the fourth session (from 2023 to 2024) – the last of the available data sets.

A weekly cyclicity was discovered: The sensitivity of the system falls for five days in a row, and then two days of a significant fall is not observed – the pattern “Working days/weekend”. On weekdays, the sensitivity is lower on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, when maintenance is carried out on the tools.

Essik also discovered daily cycle “Day/Night”. On working days, sensitivity was significantly reduced during working hours, when the activity of people was the largest. After 18:00, a noticeable rise in the level of sensitivity was observed, when human activity on the site subsided.

The most interesting observation by the author in the headline: the daily cycle shifts in time for 74 minutes when switching to summer or winter time – which almost corresponds to the expected shift for an hour.

The results of the study were not an unexpected discovery – for years, human activity affects astronomical observations. Seismologists also noticed the weekly and daily frequency of seismic noise caused by daily trips of people to work and vice versa and their activity. Even at LIGO objects themselves, such weekly cycles of activity were previously noted.

The article examines not only LIGO with detectors in Washington and Louisian. The analysis includes a background noise from Virgo located in Italy and Kagra in Japan. However, the weight of LIGO detectors in the common network is so high that weekly and daily patterns are most consistent with the American working graphics.

This discovery is not just a curious nuance of gravity-wave astronomy. It affects the types of gravitational waves that the system can detect. Gravity waves are affected by the direction from where they come, so the data can be distorted depending on both the time of year and on the time of day, and even on the day of the week. Accounting for these changes will improve the quality of observations of gravitational-wave astronomy until we build a giant cosmic interferometer, which will not interfere with earthly activity.

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