Outer Space Thread

[jim]

That's weird - that almost to me rules out some sort of intelligent alien construction project and more some funky natural thing going.

[AWvsCBsteeeerike3]

That's weird - that almost to me rules out some sort of intelligent alien construction project and more some funky natural thing going.

Yes

[Jocephus]

some rapper tweets the earth is flat and NdGT informs him

http://www.vulture.com/2016/01/neil-deg ... earth.html

[wart57]

[Donnie Ebert]

Physicists Detect Gravitational Waves, Proving Einstein Right

If replicated by future experiments, that simple chirp, which rose to the note of middle C before abruptly stopping, seems destined to take its place among the great sound bites of science, ranking with Alexander Graham Bell’s “Mr. Watson — come here” and Sputnik’s first beeps from orbit.

Middle C on the great piano of the universe.

[jim]

The universe is so bizarre. How and why do things work the way they do, and what the hell is it all?

I'll never tire of thinking about this.

[pioneer98]

That's just mind-blowing.

Thus coddled, the lasers in the present incarnation, known as Advanced LIGO, can detect changes in the length of one of those arms as small as one ten-thousandth the diameter of a proton — a subatomic particle too small to be seen by even the most powerful microscopes — as a gravitational wave sweeps through.

Detailed analysis of its form told a tale of Brobdingnagian activities 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 a billion trillion suns.

And yet it moved the LIGO mirrors only four one-thousandths of the diameter of a proton.

[go birds]

i think this is awesome but i have no idea what it means or the implications of the discovery

[jim]

Shooting big picture here to give an idea rather than be completely accurate.

The implication of this is proof that Einstein was right again - that something predicted by the General Theory of Relativity can now be observed. It is the last, unconfirmed prediction of the theory.

Gravitational waves are ripples in space time fabric caused by the collision of massive objects - a couple of black holes colliding would generate these waves that weaken over time but apparently were strong enough to still be detected here a billion years after they occurred.

Getting into spacetime etc.. on a bulletin board is tough, there are lots of good internet articles.

[wart57]

The universe is so bizarre. How and why do things work the way they do, and what the hell is it all?

I'll never tire of thinking about this.

All by accident.....