Matteo Cantiello edited untitled.tex  about 8 years ago

Commit id: 94f4cc4a0c50d5661dfb1674a81570efacd24f7b

deletions | additions      

       

The cosmic storm that produced the gravitational waves was quite gnarly: Two black holes with a combined mass larger than 60 times the mass of our Sun and separated by just a few hundred kilometers spiraling towards each other at half the speed of light and then merging. The gravitational waves detected by LIGO were produced during the very last part of the in-spiraling process (last half second), when the two black holes were almost touching each other and the amount of energy deposited in gravitational waves was the largest. Looking at the received signal, scientist were able to determine how much energy was produced during the merger event. The initial masses of the two black holes were 36 and 29 times the mass of the Sun, but after the merger the mass of the newly formed black hole was only 62 solar masses. Where did the extra 3 solar masses go? The mass was converted into energy and used to produce the gravitational waves. Which means that the power emitted by the source for the very short duration of the event was larger than the integrated power emitted by all stars in the Universe! Isn't that awesome? \textbf{This represents the most powerful event ever observed by humankind} (after the Big Bang).   The gravitational waves allowed the LIGO team to determine the distance of the merger, which turned out to have occurred 1.2 billion light years away. Why so far? The answer is that this kind of events is expected to be quite rare, so it is and it's  statistically very unlikely to have one nearby. We need to look at a large chunk of the Universe to catch one. This also explains why the LIGO experiment was so challenging: Initially the waves are pretty big and they distort space-time by a large amount, but by the time the waves reach Earth their amplitude has decreased by a factor $1/d$, where $d$ is the distance of source's distance. For  the source. In this case event detected last September,  the gravitational waves traveled 1.2 billion years, which resulted in had to travel a distance 10000 times larger than the diameter of our Galaxy. And on their arrival on Earth,  LIGO having had  to measure a change in distance as small as 1/1000 the diameter of a proton to detect them.