A Quote by Rainer Weiss
We know about black holes and neutron stars, but we hope there are other phenomena we can see because of the gravitational waves they emit.
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Things changed with the discovery of neutron stars and black holes - objects with gravitational fields so intense that dramatic space and time-warping effects occur.
We've seen black holes, which is already wonderful. We also expect to see the merger of neutron stars, and that was a thing that actually gave this field a certain credibility when it was discovered that there were pairs of neutron stars in our galaxy, and people stopped laughing at us when that was found out.
Observing gravitational waves would yield an enormous amount of information about the phenomena of strong-field gravity. If we could detect black holes collide, that would be amazing.
Black holes do not emit light, so you visualize them through gravitational lensing - how they bend light from other objects.
We knew about black holes in other ways, and we knew about neutron stars - well, those are the two things that ultimately got seen.
Gravitational waves will bring us exquisitely accurate maps of black holes - maps of their space-time. Those maps will make it crystal clear whether or not what we're dealing with are black holes as described by general relativity.
Gravitational waves will bring us exquisitely accurate maps of black holes - maps of their space-time. Those maps will make it crystal clear whether or not what were dealing with are black holes as described by general relativity.
You know we're in a planet surrounded by certain kinds of frequencies and noise. The earth's magnetic sphere makes weird sounds. The sun you know the heart of our solar system makes noise. Even interstellar phenomena like black holes. You know people have studied them and a black hole can emit sound in like the range of 20,000 octaves below B flat.
The students on my course were fascinated by the idea that gravitational waves might exist. I didn't know much about them at all, and for the life of me, I could not understand how a bar interacts with a gravitational wave.
Wormholes are a gravitational phenomena. Or imaginary gravitational phenomena, as the case may be.
How do you observe something you can't see? This is the basic question of somebody who's interested in finding and studying black holes. Because black holes are objects whose pull of gravity is so intense that nothing can escape it, not even light, so you can't see it directly.
A lot of the things you see in science fiction revolve around black holes because black holes are strong enough to rip the fabric of space and time.
General relativity predicts that time ends inside black holes because the gravitational collapse squeezes matter to infinite density.
When the signal reached LIGO from a collision of two stellar black holes that occurred 1.3 billion years ago, the 1,000-scientist-strong LIGO Scientific Collaboration was able to both identify the candidate event within minutes and perform the detailed analysis that convincingly demonstrated that gravitational waves exist.
But if you think about a practical implication of enriching your life and giving you a sense of being part of a larger cosmos and possibly being able to use this [gravitational waves] as a tool in the future maybe to listen not just to black holes colliding, but maybe listen to the big bang itself, those kind of applications may happen in the not too distant future.
The waves travel with the velocity of light and slightly squeeze and stretch space transverse to the direction of their motion. The first waves we measured came from the collision of two black holes each about 30 times the mass of our sun.
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