Gravitational Waves
primesuspect
Beepin n' BoopinDetroit, MI Icrontian
The piece from The New Yorker is the most poetic and beautiful description of today's major scientific breakthrough announcement that I've seen. Great read!
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That's so completely inaccurate. There would be SO MANY more LinkedIn emails.
You too can learn signal processing and detect gravitational waves with the magic of Python:
https://losc.ligo.org/s/events/GW150914/GW150914_tutorial.html
Yo Mama's so fat when she jumps in the pool even gravity ripples
Okay, explain to me how sound traveled that far in a vacuum? I understand their is some precedence for some atmospheric medium like gas clouds and such but I thought in space no one could hear you scream?
I want to believe, so badly, you have no idea. My imagination is running wild with it, but the idea that man can pinpoint a sound as being made 1.3 billion years ago, traveling from a place where sound typically doesn't travel, well, it's just hard for me to comprehend the discovery beyond accepting it just because their people that say so are smarter than me.... I very much would like to understand.
@Cliff_Forster
The waves produced by the merger of these black holes weren't sound waves, but rather "gravitational waves" which travel through the fabric of space-time similar to the way sound waves travel through air. Space-time is the fabric of reality as we perceive it which has three spacial axes and the perception of the forward motion of time. This event caused a ripple that was detected by scientists, proving part of Einstein's theorem.
I hope that makes it easier to understand
Is thought the first video on this page was helpful. They showed that during the press conference. The rest of the event site is good, too.
I just think it's so cool that we have a new way to examine our universe. Before all we could use was basically what is in the electromagnetic spectrum now we have a way to detect gravity waves. While probably not as immediately profound, it's like a deaf person being able to hear or a blind person being able to see. Except the deaf or blind person didn't know beforehand that they were otherwise impaired.
It is so stunningly elegant.
The "sound" propagated as gravity waves traveling at the speed of light. Never before have we had instruments of sufficient precision to detect gravity waves and their existence was only hypothetical until now. Also interestingly, the theory predicts the frequency and intensity of gravity waves for various kinds of naturally-ocurring phenomenae (based on Einstein's theory as @winfrey noted and accounting for the amount of energy released over time) suggests that they're predominantly in the human audible range for the higher-energy events (i.e. 20 Hz to 20 kHz). The "sound" you heard is playing back the recorded gravity waveform as an acoustic waveform in air. You're quite literally listening to the sound the Universe makes as it expands and contracts. It's an entirely new kind of astronomy.
So in essence this instrumentation is capable of detecting the disruptions in space time, in this case a massive vibration from two black holes getting too close and releasing a massive amount of energy, and the "sound" is putting those frequencies together and representing what it would sound like based on the vibration data?
Exactly
Icrontic, you so smart
This is a really, really good explanation of this whole thing in a way that helps dummies like me understand it. Super neat.