back to article A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... a pair of black holes coalesced resulting in largest gravitational wave we've seen

The latest gravitational wave event, announced by astrophysicists today, is a particularly good 'un. Not only is it the largest signal detected yet, it's the first time an intermediate-sized black hole has ever been spotted. Code-named GW190521, the wave was picked up by the LIGO and Virgo detectors on May 21, 2019. The blip …

  1. A Non e-mouse Silver badge
    Pint

    One heck of a blip!

    The blip, which resembled four squiggles, lasted less than one-tenth of a second, and was created when two black holes with 66 and 85 solar masses smashed into one another

    Everytime they announce a new find I'm amazed that they can tell so much from apparently so little data.

    Beers all round.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Mushroom

      Re: One heck of a blip!

      > the remaining nine solar masses were converted into energy

      This for me was 'one heck of a blip'

      [Icon - some way to go still]

      1. Wellyboot Silver badge

        Re: One heck of a blip!

        Mind boggling, the biggest conversion we've managed so far is measured in grams.

        1. GrumpenKraut
          Boffin

          Re: One heck of a blip!

          For perspective, see this ("what if" article) . And that event was even bigger.

      2. swm

        Re: One heck of a blip!

        I remember one of the first black hole collisions resulted in 3 solar masses converted to gravitational waves. If the black holes were spinning before the collision then the resulting black hole should be kicked "sideways" a small fraction of the speed of light. I wonder if this happened in this case.

  2. Conundrum1885

    Not a "Fwoop"

    More like a FwoKABOOOMp

    The energy involved is enough to literally warp the mind as well as the fabric of spacetime.

    If you thought Tsar Bomba was big, think again.

    On the flip side, if we were within maybe a few hundred light years the resulting mayhem would not be a major concern as

    everything biological on this planet would be converted into chunky salsa, though the fabric of the planet might survive the extinction

    would likely be worse than the Ordovician.

    Gamma ray burst would actually do less damage as it would merely obliterate everything on the side of the planet facing it, assuming

    that deep sea life survived the resultant firestorm then in a few hundred million years life would re-emerge onto land.

    1. karlkarl Silver badge

      Re: Not a "Fwoop"

      Can I get that as a screensaver?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Not a "Fwoop"

      > On the flip side, if we were within maybe a few hundred light years the resulting mayhem would not be a major concern as everything biological on this planet would be converted into chunky salsa, though the fabric of the planet might survive the extinction would likely be worse than the Ordovician.

      Is there a physicist in the house? Does the 9 solar masses' worth of energy mostly depart in the form of EM radiation (and therefore cooks everything nearby) or does it produce the gravity wave - which presumably is relatively harmless even to nearby systems?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Boffin

        Re: Not a "Fwoop"

        Gravitational waves. BH-BH mergers are electromagnetically dark, because long before they merge the BHs will have eaten their accretion disks, if they had any. Or rather: they are expected to be electromagnetically dark, and observations seem to confirm that they are.

        I don't know how close you can be (or how close something large can be) to something like this before the tidal stresses as the waves pass become bad however.

      2. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: Not a "Fwoop"

        > Does the 9 solar masses' worth of energy mostly depart in the form of EM radiation

        Yep mostly gamma rays, lots and lots of gamma rays

        1. This post has been deleted by its author

      3. Rich 11

        Re: Not a "Fwoop"

        When the details of the first LIGO merger detection was published I sat down and worked out what the wavelength of the gravitational wave would have been at a distance of one light year from the merger. It was something on the order of a metre.

        I still can't visualise the effect a space-time compression wave would have on objects at that scale (eg a human body), when it would pass through in just three nanoseconds. Would it be enough to overcome molecular bonds? Probably not. Could it shatter bones or turn flesh to jelly? I really don't know. Would the shear waves dump heat into the object? Quite possibly. Would I want to observe the event from that distance? No.

        1. Eclectic Man Silver badge

          Re: Not a "Fwoop"

          Did you manage to calculate the amplitude of the gravitational wave at one lightyear? It would surely be the amplitude that hurts, combined with the wavelength?

          1. Rich 11

            Re: Not a "Fwoop"

            For a compression wave the amplitude is necessarily less than the wavelength. My back-of-a-fag-packet calculation was only to get the order of magnitude, not a more accurate figure.

  3. Version 1.0 Silver badge
    Joke

    Is God a programmer?

    I'm thinking that black hole mergers are like integer overflows being reported (ERROR: INT512 overflow). The universe is like an app on your phone, it works great most of the time but every now and then something weird happens ... and it will keep happening until the battery needs replacing. But you can't do that these days, you need to buy a new phone.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Is God a programmer?

      Every geek knows that black holes themselves are essentially divide-by-zero errors.

      (God's math is beyond human understanding, and always will be.)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Is God a programmer?

        black holes themselves are essentially divide-by-zero errors

        Pffft! Divide-by-zero is the easy bit. It's when it gets to divide-by-infinity that it gets really messy...

      2. Pascal Monett Silver badge
        Happy

        Yeah, but that doesn't mean we should stop studying it.

      3. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: Is God a programmer?

        >Every geek knows that black holes themselves are essentially divide-by-zero errors.

        The singularity at the center of the BH is the divide by zero

        The black hole is the try/catch block around the singularity to stop you hitting the error

  4. JDX Gold badge

    Gravitational waves?

    I'm years out date on this - have gravitation waves now actually been confirmed and are routinely measurable, or is this shorthand for some other effect?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Boffin

      Re: Gravitational waves?

      We have direct observations of gravitational waves, yes. The first such detection was 14th September 2015 although it was not announced until February 2016.

      For quite a long time before that there have been good indirect detections of gravitational waves, notably in the Hulse-Taylor binary, but the first direct detection was GW150914.

    2. gecho

      Re: Gravitational waves?

      Interesting video on the observatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iphcyNWFD10 The variation they are measuring is 1/10,000 the width of a proton.

      1. Eclectic Man Silver badge

        Re: Gravitational waves?

        @gecho

        Excellent video, thanks for the link.

        I do wonder what is in the first aid kit tied up with string. After all he said a 1 MegaWatt laser would vaporise you, so a sticking plaster ain't gonna cut it really.

        1. Alan Brown Silver badge

          Re: Gravitational waves?

          "After all he said a 1 MegaWatt laser would vaporise you"

          Not quite true. It'll vaporise whatever happened to be in the beam path for the width of the beam

          You know those cartoon blaster holes in people's heads?

      2. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: Gravitational waves?

        >measuring is 1/10,000 the width of a proton.

        Metric or Imperial protons ?

        What's that in linguine ?

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Gravitational waves?

          "What's that in linguine ?"

          The chef couldn't find it so we don't really know.

    3. Jan 0 Silver badge

      Re: Gravitational waves?

      I'm aware that gravitational waves have been shown to exist, what puzzles me is this:

      Won't any oscillating mass produce a gravitational wave? Isn't the earth sending out gravitational waves strongly across it's orbital plane, with a frequency of one cycle per year?

      Can we not detect gravitational waves from other celestial objects in cyclical motion? Are these the same kind of waves as those produced by the collision of black holes? Does the destruction of black holes just generate higher frequencies and more radiated power?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Boffin

        Re: Gravitational waves?

        Yes, the Earth-Sun system does radiate: the total power is about 200W (compare this with the power output of the Sun which is about 3 times 10^26 W) There is no real chance of detecting such a tiny power output. The reason we need to look for very massive objects in very close orbits is because only in those cases does the power radiated become large enough to detect. That's because gravity is an absurdly weak force.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    A long way to go

    Cheers and a pint for the boffins (to be consumed at a reasonable distance from LIGO so the bubbles and burps don't affect their measurements.

    They've nailed another of the panoply of black hole sizes. Still, for those who speculate that galactic center black holes resulted from an iteration of mergers, this is a baby step. But keep observing because - science.

  6. Mike 137 Silver badge

    Talk about second class post!

    A 100 millisecond message delivered after seven billion years? Even my local postal service does better.

    But seriously, this just goes to show how difficult it is to make scientific sense of the universe. There could even be mechanisms we've not yet seen for the first time that could entirely change our views of physics. More power then to the astronomers. I'd love to have a job like that.

    1. Chris G

      Re: Talk about second class post!

      My postal service would break it if they didn't lose it first, then try to blame me for not responding to the message they didn't send.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Talk about second class post!

      A 100 millisecond message delivered after seven billion years? Even my local postal service does better.

      If your post office does better they have a time machine! Tell me who they are because I want one too!

      (This is meant to be light-hearted, I'm not sniping at you.)

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