Innovation 3894: Black Holes Dont Make a Big Splash, 2013. sciencedaily/releases/2013/11/131108091028.htm “Throughout our universe, tucked inside galaxies far, far away, giant black holes are pairing up and merging. As the massive bodies dance around each other in close embraces, they send out gravitational waves that ripple space and time themselves, even as the waves pass right through our planet Earth. Scientists know these waves, predicted by Albert Einsteins theory of relativity, exist but have yet to directly detect one. In the race to catch the waves, one strategy -- called pulsar-timing arrays -- has reached a milestone not through detecting any gravitational waves, but in revealing new information about the frequency and strength of black hole mergers. We expect that many gravitational waves are passing through us all the time, and now we have a better idea of the extent of this background activity … “Gravitational waves, if detected, would reveal more information about black holes as well as one of the four fundamental forces of nature: gravity. “The teams inability to detect any gravitational waves in the recent search actually has its own benefits, because it reveals new information about super-massive black hole mergers -- their frequency, distance from Earth and masses.”
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 15:08:31 +0000
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