RE: Brace yourselves for gravitational waves
February 11, 2016 at 5:35 pm
(This post was last modified: February 11, 2016 at 6:00 pm by Excited Penguin.)
To what degree has the existence of black holes been proven by this discovery? I've read somewhere that because of the direct observation of gravitational waves in this instance, the existence of black holes has been further validated. Is this accurate? Don't we know for sure that black holes exist at this point?
What are the implications of this that you can think of? What does this entail for the future study of physics, do you think?
This is going to be a dumb question, but are gravitational waves related in any way to the Big Bang, and can we better grasp how the birth of our universe(or its aftermath) took place, through them?
Given this, how much more reliable does general relativity as a description of gravitation become? Is it practically infallible at this point?(I really don't know much about it, excuse my ignorance).
How do gravitational waves affect time and to how much of a degree? I've seen a lot of talk about space in this context, not so much about time. For instance, take this particular effect that those two merging black holes had on space. Was it proportional to the effect it had on time? If so, how much of an effect did it have (in layman's terms, if you could)? I'm sorry if the answer is obvious and I just missed it in everything I've read about it up to this point.
I really didn't get how this discovery was made, or rather, how the Interferometer works. I particularly didn't understand how gravitational waves are supposed to have an impact on the interference pattern. Maybe this one's too complex for me to understand right now, if so, don't even answer it
.
Is it reasonable to assume that gravitational waves will definitely continue to be observed from this point forward, given that they already were in September? If so, how come more observations weren't already made in the meanwhile? Are these occurences so rare that we can't know when the next observation will take place, regardless of how well we can measure them already?
What are the implications of this that you can think of? What does this entail for the future study of physics, do you think?
This is going to be a dumb question, but are gravitational waves related in any way to the Big Bang, and can we better grasp how the birth of our universe(or its aftermath) took place, through them?
Given this, how much more reliable does general relativity as a description of gravitation become? Is it practically infallible at this point?(I really don't know much about it, excuse my ignorance).
How do gravitational waves affect time and to how much of a degree? I've seen a lot of talk about space in this context, not so much about time. For instance, take this particular effect that those two merging black holes had on space. Was it proportional to the effect it had on time? If so, how much of an effect did it have (in layman's terms, if you could)? I'm sorry if the answer is obvious and I just missed it in everything I've read about it up to this point.
I really didn't get how this discovery was made, or rather, how the Interferometer works. I particularly didn't understand how gravitational waves are supposed to have an impact on the interference pattern. Maybe this one's too complex for me to understand right now, if so, don't even answer it
.Is it reasonable to assume that gravitational waves will definitely continue to be observed from this point forward, given that they already were in September? If so, how come more observations weren't already made in the meanwhile? Are these occurences so rare that we can't know when the next observation will take place, regardless of how well we can measure them already?
