IT'S OFFICIAL: Gravitational waves have been detected, Einstein was right
ScienceAlert - 19 hours ago
in a far corner of the universe: the last waltz of a pair of black holes shockingly larger than astrophysicists had been expecting.
One of them was 36 times as massive as the sun, the other 29. As they approached the end, at half the speed of light, they were circling each other 250 times a second.
And then the ringing stopped as the two holes coalesced into a single black hole, a trapdoor in space with the equivalent mass of 62 suns. All in a fifth of a second, Earth time.
Dr. Weiss said you could reproduce the chirp by running your fingernails across the keys of a piano from the low end to middle C.
Lost in the transformation was three solar masses’ worth of energy, vaporized into gravitational waves in an unseen and barely felt apocalypse. As visible light, that energy would be equivalent to the brightness of a billion trillion suns.
And yet it moved the LIGO mirrors only four one-thousandths of the diameter of a proton.
The signal conformed precisely to the predictions of general relativity for black holes as calculated in computer simulations, Dr. Reitze said.
Gravitational Waves
Long ago, in a far off corner of the universe
physicists have implied
two block holes, as if under a curse,
circled to collide,
Round and round ,at 250 times a second
and half the speed of light
an ultimate disaster threatened
catastrophically in the night.
A mass of 29 suns finally met one of 36
in a gigantic blast that made a mass of three suns disappear
and which took a lot of advanced scientific tricks
for us, by luck, at last to overhear
as an incredibly tiny gravitational wave
that caused mirrors miles apart to very slightly misbehave.
If there is any moral to this at all
would the gigantic troubles and tears of today
on earth also perhaps seem small ---
if only,
they were millions of miles and years away?
HzL
2/12/16
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