[ExI] Gravitational Waves Detected By LIGO!

[John Clark]

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

​> ​
> Those giant black holes, have swollen millions of black holes during past
> 10 billion years.
> ​
> Each. And there are billion of them. Many such occurrences every year,
> even every day.
> ​
> We do not detect those.
>

​That is true; determining when the distance between two mirrors 2 and a
half miles apart changes by 1/10,000 the width of a proton is hard.​


> ​> ​
> Why?
>

​Be patient
. To the surprise of everybody LIGO detected the big signal and several
smaller signals during a short engineering run when it was only at a third
of it's design sensitivity. Until very recently the LIGO people were
telling everybody that they didn't expect to see anything
​ interesting
until 2017 or 2018, and when they did find something they expected it
​would ​
come from 2 neutron stars  or a neutron
​star​
 and a 8 or 9 mass black hole
​,​
not from 36 and 29 mass black holes merging, but
​​
apparently
 ​such things and gravity waves in general are more common than had been
thought.

LIGO is shut down right now so it can be twerked to reach designed
sensitivity but will come back online in late summer; that's about the same
time the European Advanced VIRGO detector starts up and it might be even
more sensitive. When that happens finding a new gravity wave event every
day may not be unrealistic.

 John K Clark     ​
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