Astronomers Have Detected The Most Powerful Black Hole Collision to Date

Four new detections of gravitational waves have been announced at the Gravitational Waves Physics and Astronomy Workshop, at the University of Maryland in the United States.

This brings the total number of detections to 11, since the first back in 2015

more…

Is it reasonable to assume then that FRBs will be most powerful in the early Universe ?

Tau.Neutrino said:

Is it reasonable to assume then that FRBs will be most powerful in the early Universe ?

What was it that caused FRBs? Remind me.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Astronomers Have Detected The Most Powerful Black Hole Collision to Date

Four new detections of gravitational waves have been announced at the Gravitational Waves Physics and Astronomy Workshop, at the University of Maryland in the United States.

This brings the total number of detections to 11, since the first back in 2015

more…

A very good read. A good orrery video too.

But I have the slight concern that every one of those starts off in a circular orbit. We know that only 50% of binary stars are in a circular orbit. We know that every star orbiting the black hole in the centre of the Milky Way is in a strongly elliptical orbit. I already know that the circular orbits of planets in the exoplanet orrery is an artifact.

So is the circular nature of the mergers in the orrery genuine, or an artifact?

“The detection of gravitational waves is a bit like acoustic ornithology. Imagine you study birds and want to determine the population of birds in a forest. You know the calls of the various bird species. When a bird call matches your predetermined call, you jump with excitement. Its loudness tells you how far away it is. If it was very faint against the background noise, you may be uncertain.”

I love that analogy.

“The weakest of the new signals, GW170729, was detected on July 29, 2017. It was the collision of a black hole 50 times the mass of the Sun, with another 34 times the mass of the Sun. This was by far the most distant event, having taken place, most likely, 5 billion years ago – before the birth of Earth and the Solar System 4.6 billion years ago. Despite the weak signal, it was the most powerful gravitational explosion discovered, so far. But because the signal was weak, this is the detection with the false alarm rate of one every five years.”

False alarm once every five years. I don’t like those odds.