Einstein was right about ripples in spacetime!

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A very wonderful discovery!

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Looks like the events we can detect by their gravity waves are too far away for us to detect the corresponding photons and neutrinos.

Apparently, the detection level for this event was a thousandth the diameter of a proton :astonished:, and that’s ten times larger than LIGO’s minimum detection level:

Great read (The New Yorker) on this remarkable find:

It took years to make the most sensitive instrument in history insensitive to everything that is not a gravitational wave. Emptying the tubes of air demanded forty days of pumping. The result was one of the purest vacuums ever created on Earth, a trillionth as dense as the atmosphere at sea level. Still, the sources of interference were almost beyond reckoning—the motion of the wind in Hanford, or of the ocean in Livingston; imperfections in the laser light as a result of fluctuations in the power grid; the jittering of individual atoms within the mirrors; distant lightning storms. All can obscure or be mistaken for a gravitational wave, and each source had to be eliminated or controlled for. One of LIGO’s systems responds to minuscule seismic tremors by activating a damping system that pushes on the mirrors with exactly the right counterforce to keep them steady; another monitors for disruptive sounds from passing cars, airplanes, or wolves.

The “chirp” of gravitational waves created by the merger of these two particular black holes can also be heard here (Popsci).

EDIT: Oh, and if you run BOINC, Einstein@home searches LIGO data for interesting stuff (black holes included).

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Someone should be noting that this claim is being made by LIGO in a press conference.This is all being reported as a “finding” but none of it has been confirmed. No results published. No peer review. LIGO, so far has spent $600,000,000 and needs to justify it’s existence. It is irresponsible science to report it before proper vetting by the scientific community.

https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102

“…with 3.0 (±0.5) (solar masses)*c^2 radiated in gravitational waves”!!!

What’s that acronym? Can’t recall what it was…maybe I’ll go and read a recent article that discusses the issue at hand…hmmm oh right

RTFA(s), yah?

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Welcome, new community member!

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Makes me wonder just what agenda is motivating JRM…

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JRM knows EXACTLY what JRM is doing…

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Also interesting, Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope potentially sees gamma rays released from LIGO’s detected gravity-wave event:

That’s it from the new poster? Just a drive by about how scientists are blowing all this money and made something up to justify it?

Jeez, they’re not the military. I’d totally spend another 620 million to help out science. I mean, that’s how we get things like microwaves and artificial hearts.

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