Gravitational Waves Found !!

Gravitational waves have been found!!

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/ligo-gravitational-waves-black-holes-einstein.html

That is just so friggin' cool.

s6

There is more information here.

https://www.astronomy.com/bonus/gravity

stealth6 said:

That is just so friggin' cool.

s6

Click to expand...

What he said!!!! Awesome!

I live less than 10 miles from the LIGO Hanford Observatory as the crow flies, and first heard about the discovery from the NY Times and the BBC, kind of ironic.

Some numbers and factoids from this:

- They observed the two black holes circling each other for just 20 milliseconds, and in that time they went from circling 30 times per second to 250 times per second. We are talking objects that are up to 35 times the mass of our sun.

- Instrumentation was sensitive enough to detect a distortion in space-time that was 1/1000th the diameter of a single atomic nucleus.

- The observed event was 1.3 billion light years away (and so of course happened 1.3 billion years ago).

In layman's terms......holy freaking sh*#!!!!

s6

Nightly news this evening on ABC gave this story about 15 seconds of coverage half way through the news. Sad. Should have been the top story.

stealth6 said:

Some numbers and factoids from this:

- They observed the two black holes circling each other for just 20 milliseconds, and in that time they went from circling 30 times per second to 250 times per second. We are talking objects that are up to 35 times the mass of our sun.

- Instrumentation was sensitive enough to detect a distortion in space-time that was 1/1000th the diameter of a single atomic nucleus.

- The observed event was 1.3 billion light years away (and so of course happened 1.3 billion years ago).

In layman's terms......holy freaking sh*#!!!!

s6

Click to expand...

Dave, good stuff you posted. When you think about these things it defies the human imagination.

There are other fascinating things. Last year 1915 was the 100th anniversary of Einstein's General Relativity. There was a good theme issue in Scientific American on this subject last September. There is an article in that issue that points out that in Einstein's first draft of his solution to gravitational waves, he found that such waves could not exist. That paper version no longer exists. In the peer review process one of the reviewers found an error. At first Einstein was stunned, because in Germany at that time there was no such thing as a peer review process. Later, he found the error and concluded that gravitational waves do exist and wrote new paper, but submitted it to a different journal.

The gravitational waves are unique in many respects. There are some mathematical solutions in the book, "Gravitation", by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler. The book is huge. Gravitational waves are called a transverse wave in that the oscillations are perpendicular or transverse to the direction of travel, similar to electromagnetic waves, but different compared to sound waves, which are longitudinal with the oscillations parallel to the wave direction. If one arranged test particles in a ring perpendicular to the direction of the gravitational wave, they would see that particles on one diameter chord would move towards each other as the wave passed, but on the chord 90 degrees away would move away from each other. However, things are more complicated than this, because a short time later this motion would be reversed as the wave continues to pass. In a way the distortion over time looks something like a cork screw. There is a good picture of this motion in the book.

Something interesting I found on Wikipedia;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S5_0014+81

Apparently it has the mass of 40 billion suns.