NASA Achieves Breakthrough Black Hole Simulation

DoctorBit writes "NASA scientists have achieved a breakthrough in simulating the merging of two same-size non-spinning black holes based on a new translation of Einstein's general relativity equations. The scientists accomplished the feat by using some brand-new tensor calculus translations on the Linux-running, 10,240 Itanium processor SGI Altix Columbia supercomputer. These are reportedly the largest astrophysical calculations ever performed on a NASA supercomputer. According to NASA's Chief Scientist, "Now when we observe a black hole merger with LIGO or LISA, we can test Einstein's theory and see whether or not he was right.""

Comments

Wasted funding?

[dada21]

I thought NASA was having financial difficulties and no real direction in where they'll "lead" us in the future. This seems like an terrible waste of taxpayer dollars.

What is the actual outcome from this research? Will this help create more energy-efficiency in the world? Will it help us find technology that humanity can actually use to make a better society? Will it increase our safety, or decrease power of madmen and dictators?

Stories like this make me feel sad that many people feel we need public funding for research that seems to have no real gain for those paying for it. Sure, I love physics and astrophysics, but I would rather voluntarily give a few hundred greenbacks a year to a private research company that see it wasted on publicans who get paid no matter what they're doing.

Re:Wasted funding?

[mapkinase]

more knowledge about the universe and how it might work.

Nope. You have to do real experiments to get that.

maybe, who can say what future developments and understanding of this area of physics will bring.

key word is "understanding". Understanding is impossible without normal scientific cycle which includes hypothesis, theory and experiment. There is no experiment here.

today GPS relies on general relativity.

Right, if by "relies" you mean 1e-7s correction.

the obvious answer is probably not. and while these are important questions, this one is not topical in this discussion.

Correct. 1 out of 4.

More like...

[turgid]

...5% of all the intanium chips in the world used for a single simulation, and they were given to the customer free, gratis and for nothing because otherwise they'd have bought an Opteron cluster...