What the discovery of gravitational waves means | Allan Adams
More than a billion years ago, two black holes in a distant galaxy locked into a spiral, falling inexorably toward each other, and collided. "All that energy was pumped into the fabric of time...
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1.3 billion years ago, in a distant, distant galaxy, two black holes locked into a spiral, falling inexorably towards each other and collided, converting three Suns' worth of stuff into pure energy in a tenth of a second. For that brief moment in time, the glow was brighter than all the stars in all the galaxies in all of the known Universe. It was a very big bang. But they didn't release their energy in light. I mean, you know, they're black holes. All that energy was pumped into the fabric of space and time itself, making the Universe explode in gravitational waves. Let me give you a sense of the timescale at work here. 1.3 billion years ago, Earth had just managed to evolve multicellular life. Since then, Earth has made and evol...
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1.3 billion years ago, in a distant, distant galaxy, two black holes locked into a spiral, falling inexorably towards each other and collided, converting three Suns' worth of stuff into pure energy in a tenth of a second. For that brief moment in time, the glow was brighter than all the stars in all the galaxies in all of the known Universe. It was a very big bang. But they didn't release their energy in light. I mean, you know, they're black holes. All that energy was pumped into the fabric of space and time itself, making the Universe explode in gravitational waves. Let me give you a sense of the timescale at work here. 1.3 billion years ago, Earth had just managed to evolve multicellular life. Since then, Earth has made and evol...
