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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"


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Monday November 20 2017, @12:53PM

    by stormwyrm (717) on Monday November 20 2017, @12:53PM (#599228) Journal
    Gravitational waves aren't emitted only during final inspiral, although when that does happen a strong burst of gravitational waves is also generated. The orbits of all bodies orbiting under gravitation constantly lose energy by radiating gravitational waves, even the sun and the earth, although the power loss from the earth-sun system by gravitational radiation is only in the range of 200 W, so the earth and sun will take something like 1023 years to inspiral the way those black holes did, assuming nothing else happens to the solar system in that time. For objects like these black holes though where the gravitational fields are far, far stronger, the amount of time it takes is much briefer. A day and a half before the inspiral was detected, the gravitational waves that were reaching us from those two black holes were radiated from them when they were at a separation of some 10,000 km, and they were emitted with a power of some 3×1039 watts. Those gravitational waves though were not at frequencies that LIGO could detect. It will take a different design of gravitational wave observatory to see those kinds of waves.
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