Brace yourselves for gravitational waves

[vorlon13]

Wife and I have been discussing this exact question over dinner just now  They probably did  fit the shape of the signal (which has features such as frequency, change in frequency, relative height of peaks) to their general relativity supercomputer simulation to fit the two masses - they hinted at that in their presentation. My guess is that from that comparison you get the radiated power, and knowing the theoretically derived power of the source and the size of the signal as measured on earth, you can derive the distance by calculating how much it has gotten weaker on the way, in this case 1.3 billion lightyears or so. From the time delay between the two detectors you get an approximate region in the sky from which it likely came (roughly the direction of one of the magellanic clouds, but of course much farther away)

I would imagine that if there had once been life in the neighborhood of the merger, there isn't any longer..

Indeed, and 20-35 solar mass progenitor stars are big nasties throughout their lives.  So, anyone close would already have been zorched by prior misbehavior.

[Jackalope]

I would imagine that if there had once been life in the neighborhood of the merger, there isn't any longer..

Indeed, and 20-35 solar mass progenitor stars are big nasties throughout their lives.  So, anyone close would already have been zorched by prior misbehavior.

Well... Close is a relative term. Enormous stars like that certainly are going to bathe their immediate neighborhood with radiation, but the merger is many, many orders of magnitude more energetic, and the calamity would be less localized, I would imagine. I mean, the merger is even many orders of magnitude more energetic than when they originally collapsed, and that would have been bad enough.

[vorlon13]

3 solar masses worth of gravitational energy sounds bad, but a light year away, it won't turn you inside out.

The prior supernova blasts of the progenitor stars would have reduced you 1,000,000 SPF sun block to a glowing fog of atoms.

[Jackalope]

3 solar masses worth of gravitational energy sounds bad, but a light year away, it won't turn you inside out.

The prior supernova blasts of the progenitor stars would have reduced you 1,000,000 SPF sun block to a glowing fog of atoms.

I'm not thinking about the 3 solar masses worth of gravitational energy, I'm thinking about the radiatio. Power of 50x the light of the universe part.

[vorlon13]

You're mostly transparent.

(is that the right word?)

[vorlon13]

The earth is radiating gravitational radiation as it orbits the sun.

The sun radiates it going around the galaxy too.

Baring some other calamity, we eventually plop into the central galactic blackhole as a result. Don't hold your breath, it takes a really, really long time.

[Jackalope]

I expect to be dead long before that happens. I suspect the sun will have gone red giant / white dwarf and the earth destroyed long prior as well.

[ignoramus]

Alex, how did someone even get the original hint about these 2 black holes?

[vorlon13]

Every atom in our galaxy is radiating vanishingly tiny tiny tiny tiny (add about 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 more tinys) amounts of gravitational radiation as they spin around in the Milky Way. Looks like everything gets sucked up eventually in the central black hole, digested, and then ever so slowly radiated away into a vast cold dark and empty dead universe as Hawking Radiation.

A rather austere fate for all of us.

It should serve to further depress us in our dark moments . . . . .

[SteelCurtain]

I read about this today. So fucking cool. My desktop wallpaper automatically updates to APOD (NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day) and this is today's:



http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html