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posted by martyb on Thursday September 28 2017, @04:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the That's-heavy,-man! dept.

For the first time three gravitational wave detectors have recorded the same event. The detection was made by both LIGO and Advanced Virgo (which has just recently begun collecting data for the first time). From the news release:

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo collaboration report the first joint detection of gravitational waves with both the LIGO and Virgo detectors. This is the fourth announced detection of a binary black hole system and the first significant gravitational-wave signal recorded by the Virgo detector, and highlights the scientific potential of a three-detector network of gravitational-wave detectors.

The three-detector observation was made on August 14, 2017 at 10:30:43 UTC. The two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Virgo detector, located near Pisa, Italy, detected a transient gravitational-wave signal produced by the coalescence of two stellar mass black holes.

A paper about the event, known as GW170814, has been accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by FatPhil on Thursday September 28 2017, @06:45AM (3 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday September 28 2017, @06:45AM (#574261) Homepage
    Based on the orbital period of the small clusters of visible stars at the centre of our galaxy, what mass must whatever they're orbitting be? What force do you know of that would be able to prevent a stellar-density object of that mass from collapsing under its own gravity until its radius was smaller than its Schwartzchild radius (I do not demand that it collapse all the way to a singularity, only that it grows an event horizon). Your evidence for this new force is what? What makes this new force prevent light from escaping from this matter? How is your new force more believable than what is explainable by GR?

    We have things that look like black holes, we can see their action - there's something definitely black-hole-like out there, we have a mechanism by which black holes can form, and which models their post-formation behaviour, which matches what we can observe. Later observations (such as these LIGO ones) agree with every prediction that has been made about black hole behaviour, and note that I am emphasising that the science is not just descriptive, but predictive.

    We have duck theory, we see things that are shaped like theoretical ducks, they waddle like theoretical ducks, and now they quack like theoretical ducks. A claim that they don't exist is now the extreme one, which requires extremely good evidence to support.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 28 2017, @08:58AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 28 2017, @08:58AM (#574289)

    What force do you know of that would be able to prevent a stellar-density object of that mass from collapsing under its own gravity until its radius was smaller than its Schwartzchild radius

    Funnily, the size of the observable universe and the mass within it make the observable universe smaller than its Schwarzschild Radius.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_radius#Parameters [wikipedia.org]

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 28 2017, @12:47PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 28 2017, @12:47PM (#574323)

      No, the observable universe [wikipedia.org] is a sphere around Earth with a radius of 46 billion light years. Even the age of the universe is estimated to be 13.799 billion years, which is more than the number of light years for the listed Schwarzschild Radius.

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday September 29 2017, @08:05AM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday September 29 2017, @08:05AM (#574711) Homepage
      It is not unusual for mathematical models that are useful on the small scale (and the centre of a galaxy is a tiny thing compared to the known universe) to lose their usefulness when taken to the kinds of scales they weren't designed for. I should perhaps have specified "non-expanding" in my original claim. We're expanding. Anyone claiming that there's something that isn't a black hole that we can't see attracting the stars at the centre of our galaxy is expanding would also need to justify that claim and incorporate it into their model.
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves