[ExI] ligo does it again

[John Clark]

On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 9:19 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:


> ​> ​
> ASTONISHING!  Hanford LIGO just announced the detection of the 4th black
> hole merger:
>
> https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/WA/news
>
>
>
> How can there be so many of these?  John?
>

​And how can they be so big? Nobody predicted that, just a few years ago
people were saying if LIGO found anything (and some said they wouldn't) it
would be Black Hole mergers in the 7 or 8 solar mass range not the 40 to 50
solar mass range they actually have been seeing. It seems to me either
they're  primordial and were formed less than a nanosecond after the Big
Bang (and possibly are the cause of Dark Matter) or they came from the
first generation of stars. Nobody has yet seen a first generation star but
everybody knew they must have been larger than the stars we see today due
to the lack of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, but nobody
predicted they would be *that* much heavier.

It was great to have 3 detectors this time, too bad all 3 were only working
together for a month, LIGO will now be offline for at least a year while it
undergoes further upgrades, so right now we only have Virgo in Italy and
it's only about a quarter as sensitive as LIGO. I hope when LIGO come back
in a year VIRGO doesn't go offline for upgrades, they've got to get their
maintenance schedules in sync because the say *“With the next observing run
planned for Fall 2018 we can expect such detections weekly or even more
often.” *That would be really cool!

  John K Clark
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