Computer Simulations Point To the Source of Gravitational Waves (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader writes from a report via The Verge: On February 11th, scientists at the LIGO observatory made history when they announced the detection of the first gravitational waves. A new study says the gravitational waves likely came from two massive suns that formed about 12 billion years ago, or two billion years after the Big Bang. The researcher's calculations have been published today in the journal Nature, and were determined by running a complex simulation called the Synthetic Universe: a computer model that simulates how the Universe may have evolved since the start of the Big Bang. The simulation even includes a synthetic LIGO detector to determine the types of objects that the observatory would detect over time. The Synthetic Universe can also make predictions as it includes a mock-LIGO to chronologically sync when we detected the waves. If the model is correct, we should see LIGO pick up to 60 detections when it begins its next observation run this fall. It could hear up to 1,000 detections annually at its peak sensitivity. The lead study author Chris Belczynski speculates specifically the size of black hole mergers that the LIGO should be able to detect from gravitational waves, a combined mass between 20 and 80 times the mass of our sun, indicating that they're likely from soon after the Big Bang when stars had lower metal content and formed proportionately larger black holes. His model suggests that the ones that collided to make these gravitational waves were stars that formed 12 billion years ago, became black holes 5 million years later, and then merged 10.3 billion years after that.

Comments

Re: Practical value?

[Z00L00K]

Sometimes the practical use will be revealed a lot later and result in new discoveries.

If you stop being curious then it's time to close the shop.

Re:Practical value?

[wonkey_monkey]

What is the practical value of this?

What's the practical value of you?

Furthermore, there's already abundant evidence supporting relativity (which does have practical uses)

It does now. What practical uses did it have when (or before) it was discovered?

Re: Wrong! They were made by Jesus

[hcs_$reboot]

It's doubtful you'll find any reference to "gravitational waves" in "the book". This is how work religions: a guy writes a lot of things that could be true at time t in order to convince people (gain power), but these things do not make sense anymore at time t + x years thanks to advances in technology and science. But even nowadays many people prefer to believe in historical religious values, thanks to ignorance.