Second Gravitational Wave Detected From Ancient Black Hole Collision (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Physicists have detected ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were set in motion by the collision of two black holes far across the universe more than a billion years ago. The event marks only the second time that scientists have spotted gravitational waves, the tenuous stretching and squeezing of spacetime predicted by Einstein more than a century ago. The faint signal received by the twin instruments of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US revealed two black holes circling one another 27 times before finally smashing together at half the speed of light. The cataclysmic event saw the black holes, one eight times more massive than the sun, the other 14 times more massive, merge into one about 21 times heavier than the sun. In the process, energy equivalent to the mass of the sun radiated into space as gravitational waves. Writing in the journal Physical Review Letters on Wednesday, the LIGO team describes how a second rush of gravitational waves showed up in their instrument a few months after the first, at 3.38am UK time on Boxing Day morning 2015. An automatic search detected the signals and emailed the LIGO scientists within minutes to alert them. The latest signals arrived at the Livingston detector 1.1milliseconds before they hit the Hanford detector, allowing scientists on the team to roughly work out the position of the collision in the sky. In February, LIGO scientists officially announced the first-ever observation of gravity waves.

Comments

Re:Why?

[MightyMartian]

You have no idea what it will or will not address. When the first scientists were mucking around with electricity in the 18th century they were giving people shocks and making frogs legs jump. Within a hundred years they were rolling out the world's first global high speed communication's system.

So take your contrarianism and stick it up your ass. Your type would have us still beating each other with sticks, because, you know, what good does that shiny shit in the ground do us?

Re:Why?

[Megol]

Strangely enough humanity as a whole can multitask. Individuals can too.

For your complaint to be valid humanity could only do one thing at a time, that specialization doesn't help when developing something (humans are replaceable cogs) and that somehow your idea what is important is the key to future advancements. You also disregard the fact that basic research often helps progress in unexpected ways - including the area of microscopy.

However you seem to think that just throwing monkeys (read: humans) on typewriters (research) is the best way to develop solutions. That in itself should be a huge warning sign that you shouldn't be taken serious.

Re:ALIENS.

[bondsbw]

gravity waves propagating through spacetime faster than the speed of light would mean that the universe doesn't work the way we thought

FTFY.

Science.