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Gravitational waves felt from black-hole merger 3 billion light-years away

G

GK86

Homeland Security Fail
Much, much more at the link.

Sim of what it looks like:

mPjR8hd.gif


The void is rocking and rolling with invisible cataclysms.

Astronomers said Thursday that they had felt space-time vibrations known as gravitational waves from the merger of a pair of mammoth black holes resulting in a pit of infinitely deep darkness weighing as much as 49 suns, some 3 billion light-years from here.

This is the third black-hole smashup that astronomers have detected since they started keeping watch on the cosmos back in September 2015, with LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. All of them are more massive than the black holes that astronomers had previously identified as the remnants of dead stars.

In less than two short years, the observatory has wrought twin revolutions. It validated Einstein’s longstanding prediction that space-time can shake like a bowlful of jelly when massive objects swing their weight around, and it has put astronomers on intimate terms with the most extreme objects in his cosmic zoo and the ones so far doing the shaking: massive black holes.

“We are moving in a substantial way away from novelty towards where we can seriously say we are developing black-hole astronomy,” said David Shoemaker, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and spokesman for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, an international network of about 1,000 astronomers and physicists who use the LIGO data. They and a similar European group named Virgo are collectively the 1,300 authors of a report on the most recent event that will be published in the journal Physical Review Letters on Thursday.
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The National Science Foundation, which poured $1 billion into LIGO over 40 years, responded with pride. “This is exactly what we hoped for from N.S.F.’s investment in LIGO: taking us deeper into time and space in ways we couldn’t do before the detection of gravitational waves,” Frances Cordova, the foundation’s director, said in a statement. “In this case, we’re exploring approximately 3 billion light-years away!”

In the latest LIGO event, a black hole 19 times the mass of the sun and another black hole 31 times the sun’s mass, married to make a single hole of 49 solar masses. During the last frantic moments of the merger, they were shedding more energy in the form of gravitational waves than all the stars in the observable universe.

After a journey lasting 3 billion light-years, that is to say, a quarter of the age of the universe, those waves started jiggling LIGO’s mirrors back and forth by a fraction of an atomic diameter 20 times a second. The pitch rose to 180 cycles per second in about a tenth of a second before cutting off.
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Z

zoukka

Member
I just love the idea of everything wiping out in a blink of an eye because of a colossal event like this. Like I'm typing this message and the next nanosecond nothing of earth would exist except space dust <3
 
F

FyreWulff

Member
and just think, we finally got to this part. Now if we can build bigger detectors out of satellites we can start detecting gravitational waves caused by smaller and smaller masses.

edit: and the more we build the more accurately we can pinpoint where they came from in space
 
E

Earthbound64

Banned
zoukka said:
I just love the idea of everything wiping out in a blink of an eye because of a colossal event like this. Like I'm typing this message and the next nanosecond nothing of earth would exist except space dust <3
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I hate to break it to you, but, it wouldn't be a nanosecond to you, and to you it wouldn't be the blink of an eye.
Prepare for eternal suffering.


Undrey said:
Is there any chance like a huge comet or a planet or something collides with the earth with little to no warning?
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No.
 
K

Kinitari

Black Canada Mafia
I imagine this shit is just constantly happening all over the place, and ever since 2015 we have a slightly larger window into the universe. I imagine the next advancement in the observation of the universe is going to have a similar effect.

What's interesting is the gravitational waves producing so much energy. It highlights how wonky things get when you push reality to some kind of extreme

Earthbound64 said:
I hate to break it to you, but, it wouldn't be a nanosecond to you, and to you it wouldn't be the blink of an eye.
Prepare for eternal suffering.
Click to expand...

Is this from that movie about space hell?
 
A

azyless

Member
Undrey said:
Is there any chance like a huge comet or a planet or something collides with the earth with little to no warning? That is legit one of my biggest fears.
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If it's huge enough I'm not sure what good a warning would do. Chances are infinitely small though.
 
K

Kreuzader

Member
Undrey said:
Fixed that for you.

Is there any chance like a huge comet or a planet or something collides with the earth with little to no warning? That is legit one of my biggest fears.
Click to expand...

yes - damocloids are dark solar system bodies on orbits with a relative velocity to Earth; one would be difficult to observe with advance warning, much less stop, if on an Earth-impacting trajectory.

Odds are minuscule at this stage in history though.
 
R

rjinaz

Member
Kinitari said:
I imagine this shit is just constantly happening all over the place, and ever since 2015 we have a slightly larger window into the universe. I imagine the next advancement in the observation of the universe is going to have a similar effect.

What's interesting is the gravitational waves producing so much energy. It highlights how wonky things get when you push reality to some kind of extreme



Is this from that movie about space hell?
Click to expand...

I think SG-1 did something similar. Because of a Black hole, the team on the otherside of the wormhole, died very, very slowly.
 
B

backflip10019

Member
Actually pretty terrifying to think how a massive object so far away could complete devastate life on this planet in an instant by sheer terrible luck.
 
E

Earthbound64

Banned
Undrey said:
Regarding infinite suffering, would my body exist? Because then wouldn't I just starve to death or something.
Click to expand...

Your body would still exist. But you wouldn't starve to death because the parts of you that need food would be passing time at the same rate as well.
 
B

BackLogJoe

Member
Just imagine if we could put all of our energy towards stuff like this instead of having to still defend our well being from Trump.
 
F

FyreWulff

Member
If you fall into a singularity, it's over for you within minutes. Depends on how much mass the black hole has, which makes the event horizon expand further from the singularity.

To an outside observer watching you fall into a black hole, you appear to freeze in time and then eventually redshift out of view.
 
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