The phenomenon was detected by the collision of two black holes. Using the world’s most sophisticated detector, the scientists listened for 20 thousandths of a second as the two giant black holes, one 35 times the mass of the sun, the other slightly smaller, circled around each other.
At the beginning of the signal, their calculations told them how stars perish: the two objects had begun by circling each other 30 times a second. By the end of the 20 millisecond snatch of data, the two had accelerated to 250 times a second before the final collision and dark merger.
The observation signals the opening of a new window on to the universe.
“This is transformational,” said Prof Alberto Vecchio, of the University of Birmingham, and one of the researchers at Ligo. “This observation is truly incredible science and marks three milestones for physics: the direct detection of gravitational waves, the first detection of a binary black hole, and the most convincing evidence to date that nature’s black holes are the objects predicted by Einstein’s theory.”
Meanwhile... Observations closer to home reveal a long time gravitational wave... if you will.
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| Man withdrawing cash from ATM in Thailand. |
17 comments:
Why are old white guys so attractive to slow drivers.
Because they are old enough to catch.
I read the item with interest because I have always found gravity to be a particularly vexing problem, and it only gets worse as you get older. We really need to be looking at the laws of gravity which are so oppressive to the poor, the elderly, and the heavy. They say that this discovery is transformative, but I see no immediate application towards the betterment of anyone's life. A really transformative discovery would be how to grow gossamer wings to relieve the ravages of gravity.
It's transformative in that, for physics and physicists it cements general relativity and fills another cubbie hole in the grand model of physics. In the end, gravitational waves mean next to nothing. However, what I didn't see was, how fast did those gravitational waves travel. That was never mentioned.
These guys, standing in the corner, raised their hands.
How much of the money that that guy takes out of the ATM will those women get?
Here's a Q&A with the two guy responsible for the discovery I linked above. It could be useful the next time you see atheist criticizing a believer for relying on faith alone.
Q: What caused our Big Bang?
TC: There’s no explanation – the equations simply assume it happened.
IC: The repeated doubling in size of an explosive subatomic speck of inflating material.
Q: Did our Big Bang happen at a single point?
TC: No.
IC: Almost: it began in a region of space much smaller than an atom.
Q: Where in space did our Big Bang explosion happen?
TC: It happened everywhere, at an infinite number of points, all at once, with no explanation for the synchronization.
IC: In that tiny region – but inflation stretched it out to about the size of a grapefruit growing so fast that the subsequent expansion made it larger than all the space that we see today.
Q: How could an infinite space get created in a finite time?
TC: There’s no explanation — the equations simply assume that as soon as there was any space at all, it was infinite in size.
IC: By exploiting a clever loophole in Einstein’s general relativity theory, inflation produces an infinite number of galaxies by continuing forever, and an observer in one of these galaxies will view space and time differently, perceiving space as having been infinite already when inflation ended.
Q: How big is space?
TC: There’s no prediction.
IC: Probably infinite.
Oh look. Bags is posting photos from his last vacation. Sweet.
The reality of a black hole - mass so condensed that it becomes gravity that nothing can escape, at least that's my layman's understanding of the phenomenon - is so fantastic that it makes the ability of the gravitational attraction of that old haole's wallet to overcome the repulsion of his corporeal substance to those two heat seeking missiles at his sides a piece of cake in comparison. Am I clear?! God, I hope not.
If this old dog's wallet was fatter my 50 yr old gravitational attraction to Thailand and Vietnam might still be strong enough to pull me over there.
I don't know if I ever told this story here, but I visited Vietnam a few years back, and my Taiwanese guides took me to one of the ubiquitous massage parlors in Ho Chi Minh City. Literally a small apartment in the city where we walked through living rooms and the kitchen to a back room where we were all laid down on beds and these very small, young but adult women would walk on our backs and sit on us, and massage our whole bodies. Everybody was clothed and it was nothing sexual, although it was clearly insinuated, that it was available if I asked for it. They were fascinated with me there since, besides being the rare American they meet, I have unusual blue green eyes that they thought were freakish. They would call everyone in to look at my eyes, and say things in Vietnamese that sounded like they wanted to pluck them out and sell them. Anyway, this very attractive massage girl, all of 95 pounds, climbs up and sits on my chest. She's wearing a commie Red T-shirt which she points to and says to me in broken English: "You now what this color means? It means victory." Everyone laughs and we continue on with the massages. That was one of my more tame encounters during my visit. Rich Chinese guys in Vietnam make Las Vegas look like Disneyland. They go nuts. I was like a virgin puritan on board a pirate ship.
I doubt the detection, though not gravity waves.
The signal is too small and the noise is too big. I bet they find a statistical problem.
Their method of detection is to correllate incoming noise with every possible black hole chirp. If you run lots of waveforms it's equivalent to just open listening, once you get the false alarm rate set right, which I suspect they have not done.
Here's a Q&A with the two guy responsible for the discovery I linked above. It could be useful the next time you see atheist criticizing a believer for relying on faith alone.
How do you figure that?
Read it. It's faith based. No evidence, just belief, on several of the major points related to the Big Bang Theory. Some of those beliefs are at least as supernatural as belief in a Supreme Being.
"It happened everywhere, at an infinite number of points, all at once, with no explanation for the synchronization."
Give me a break.
That's practically a quote from Genesis.
On second thought, those two might actually be lady boys. You'll have to ask Troop about this only because he knows more about that i would.
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