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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

There have been earlier rumors [skyandtelescope.com] that the LIGO team [ligo.org] has seen something exciting, but nothing was substantiated. Now, an email message that ended up on Twitter says that an announcement is imminent [sciencemag.org]. What makes this different its specificity.

According to Burgess's email, which found its way onto Twitter as an image attached to a tweet from one of his colleagues, LIGO researchers have seen two black holes, of 29 and 36 solar masses, swirling together and merging. The statistical significance of the signal is supposedly very high, exceeding the "five-sigma" standard that physicists use to distinguish evidence strong enough to claim discovery.

If this is true . . .

". . . then you have 90% odds that it will win the Nobel Prize in Physics this year," Burgess says. "It's off-the-scale huge."

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