[ExI] Gravitational Waves Detected By LIGO!

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Sat Feb 13 18:40:16 UTC 2016


On Sat, Feb 13, 2016 at 6:50 AM, Tomaz Kristan <protokol2020 at gmail.com>
wrote:


> ​> ​
> what's bothering me is also the super-massive black hole in our Galaxy,
> five orders of magnitude closer and about five orders of magnitude as
> massive, orbiting by many massive stars ... but no gravity waves from there.
> ​ ​
> That was my line of reasoning all along. If we can't gravitationally see
> this, how we could see something much smaller, so far away?
>

​The only thing that can make gravitational waves is an accelerating mass,
so a black hole that is just sitting there will not produce gravitational
waves no matter how big the hole is. Even a giant star the runs out of fuel
and collapses into a black hole will not produce gravity waves because the
collapse is symmetrical and the waves will cancel out. You need asymmetry
for waves such as happens when 2 orbiting black holes merge. The
supermassive black
hole in the center of our Galaxy will produce no gravity waves, but 2 much
much smaller neutron stars in a close orbit will.

 John K Clark
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