And it’s not clear if anything can be done about the problem.
Tracking gravitational waves—invisible ripples in space-time from intense astronomical events—pushes the limits of what astronomers must do to reduce unwanted noise. Scientists have been getting increasingly better at doing just that, but new research warns that something rather unexpected might be getting in the way: daylight savings time.
In a preprint titled “Can LIGO Detect Daylight Savings Time?,” Reed Essick, former LIGO member and now a physicist at the University of Toronto, gives a simple answer to the paper’s title: “Yes, it can.” The paper, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, was recently uploaded to arXiv.
That might seem like an odd connection. It’s true that observational astronomy must contend with noise from light pollution, satellites, and communication signals. But these are tangible sources of noise that scientists can sink their teeth into, whereas daylight savings time is considerably more nebulous and abstract as a potential problem.
To be clear, and as the paper points out, daylight savings time does not influence actual signals from merging black holes billions of light-years away—which, as far as we know, don’t operate on daylight savings time. The “detection” here refers to the “non-trivial” changes in human activity having to do with the researchers involved in this kind of work, among other work- and process-related factors tied to the sudden shift in time.
