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posted by Fnord666 on Monday November 20 2017, @02:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the size-matters dept.

Even small black holes emit gravitational waves when they collide, and LIGO heard them

LIGO scientists say they have discovered gravitational waves coming from another black hole merger, and it's the tiniest one they've ever seen.

The findings, submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters, could shed light on the diversity of the black hole population — and may help scientists figure out why larger black holes appear to behave a little differently from the smaller ones.

"Its mass makes it very interesting," said Salvatore Vitale, a data analyst and theorist with the LIGO Lab at MIT. The discovery, he added, "really starts populating more of this low-mass region that [until now] was quite empty."

The black holes had estimated masses of around 12 and 7 solar masses.

Related: LIGO May Have Detected Merging Neutron Stars for the First Time
First Joint Detection of Gravitational Waves by LIGO and Virgo
"Kilonova" Observed Using Gravitational Waves, Sparking Era of "Multimessenger Astrophysics"


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Monday November 20 2017, @09:41AM (2 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday November 20 2017, @09:41AM (#599203) Homepage
    In particular, when they are in the "spin fit", they are perturbing the gravitiational field, which means that they are losing energy to it. Therefore their mutual orbit decays, and they get closer. The closer they are, the more they perturb the field, so the more they radiate, and the closer they get, so there's an accelleration of the process over time until that final chirp right before they merge.
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  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Monday November 20 2017, @10:31AM

    by anubi (2828) on Monday November 20 2017, @10:31AM (#599212) Journal

    Thanks... I was looking for what would provide the "resistance" to slow it down. I was envisioning a barbell-shaped mass spending an eternity in a high speed spin with nothing to slow it down. I never considered the energy needed to create gravitational waves.

    I considered "tidal" fields, as in how the earth and moon interact through gravity, with the earth gradually slowing down as it transfers its rotational inertia to the moon, slinging it further and further out. But I saw no nearby thing to transfer the energy to.

    Just because it isn't nearby does not mean its not there. Those gravitational waves go on to infinity, I suppose, giving infinitesimally small ( but non-zero ) drag on the rotating pair.

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    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Monday November 20 2017, @11:31PM

    by edIII (791) on Monday November 20 2017, @11:31PM (#599439)

    Thanks. I always appreciate the explanations from you guys :)

    --
    Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.