LIGO’s “GW150914 signal” reproduced under YARK theory of gravity

Abstract

The widely publicized “GW150914 event” that was recently detected by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration is given as confirmation of gravitational waves (GWs) predicted by Albert Einstein in his general theory of relativity (GTR), although the extremely weak intensity of this signal does not allow confirmation of all of the specific properties of GWs predicted in GTR. In the present contribution, we provide an alternative explanation of the LIGO signal without GWs under the framework of Yarman–Arik–Kholmetskii (YARK) gravitation theory, which has garnered considerable success during the past years in accounting for landmark astrophysical observations so far thought to confirm GTR, as well as recent laboratory-scale experiments that were shown to be at odds with GTR. According to YARK, the coalescence of super-massive bodies in a distant binary system would induce a related alteration of the wavelength of the laser beam used in the LIGO Michelson–Morley interferometer, as well as the emergence of mechanical stresses in the suspended mirrors. We show that the latter effect turns out to be negligible, and thus, the variation of the phase alone of the laser beam in the output of the Michelson–Morley interferometer suffices to describe the amplitude and the shape of the observed LIGO signal. In addition, the binary merger necessitates a rest mass decrease in YARK (which we calculated to be about 3.1 solar masses on the whole) that we predict should be released via electromagnetic radiation emission according to our theory. We point out that electromagnetic radiation of exactly the same kind is in fact responsible, instead of GWs, for the energy loss in the Hulse–Taylor binary system. Our numerical results thus well match the GW150914 interference pattern without involving any GWs hypothesis.