Ah, what’s all the hype about, anyway? It’s just a couple black holes colliding, billions of light years away. Oh, ok, it’s only the second time we’ve seen it happening, sure, rah rah rah. Yeah sure, it’s a brand new way to explore our Universe and understand the fundamental forces and mechanisms by which it all works. Call me when they come up with something REALLY exciting, like Warp Drive.
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Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger
When the LIGO observatory announced in February that it had successfully observed gravitational waves (https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/DUp4TPcrFfJ), there was a great deal of excitement, because the observatory had spotted its first black hole collision almost the moment it was switched on. This led to the suggestion that these may be relatively common events, and that LIGO was powerful enough to see them on a regular basis – enough to truly justify the “O” in its name (“Observatory”), and make it not just a physics experiment but the world’s first gravitational telescope.
As of today, we have a confirmation of this hunch: LIGO has spotted a second black hole collision, this one somewhat smaller than the first. The second observation took place on December 26th, and has now been confirmed. (LIGO is very paranoid about its data quality, and so spends months after each candidate observation vetting it before announcing anything; the first observation happened on September 14th and was announced February 11th)
We can see black holes, reliably.