“If we wait long enough, then eventually LIGO will see something that could only have come from these star clusters, because it would be bigger than anything you could get from a single star,” Rodriguez says. “My co-authors and I have a bet against a couple people studying binary star formation that within the first 100 LIGO detections, LIGO will detect something within this upper mass gap. I get a nice bottle of wine if that happens to be true.”
The detection of gravitational waves was a historic accomplishment, and one that has enabled astronomers to conduct new and exciting research. Already, scientists are gaining new insight into black holes by studying the byproduct of their mergers. In the coming years, we can expect to learn a great deal more thanks to improve methods and increased cooperation between observatories.
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Cool. For decades after the establishment of General Relativity, very few scientists studied it because there was no way to do new experiments or observations. That’s changed.
“This assumption, however, seems to contradict the measurements from LIGO, which has so far only detected binary black holes with low spins”
I assume that if they spin in the same direction they would slow each other down as they approached. If they spun in different directions it would speed their merger? I have something like circles spinning in fluid in mind, actual matter spinning around the orbit of the Black Hole, one flow hits the flow of the other and produces resistance?
I heard one physicist say every time they open a new window on the universe, the most exciting thing isn’t necessarily the answers they get to old questions, but the totally new discoveries they make that they had no idea were out there.
Cosmologists have the cosmic microwave background (CMB), and have learned some things about the Big Bang studying it. I’ve just started wondering about whether or not there could be anything comparable in gravitational waves, the “cosmic gravitational wave background (CGWB),” and could it tell us anything the CMB doesn’t?