> Dubbed GW170608, the latest discovery was produced by the merger of two relatively light black holes, 7 and 12 times the mass of the sun, at a distance of about a billion light-years from Earth. The merger left behind a final black hole 18 times the mass of the sun, meaning that energy equivalent to about 1 solar mass was emitted as gravitational waves during the collision.<p>I wonder if one would experience any macroscopic effects from the gravitational waves if one were close enough to the black holes during the merger. Or would one have to be so close that tidal effects from the black holes' gravity would mask any of those effects?<p>I ask because one solar mass worth of energy sounds like ... a lot. At least to me as an astronomical layperson.
Six black hole merges observed in ~2 years! That's quite interesting. More observations will make for some useful statistical study.<p>I wonder if this would give us any insights w.r.t. matter and its distribution across the Universe, and/or help us better understand/estimate dark matter/energy.
A 1 kg block of plutonium 12,000km away has ~5 orders of magnitude stronger gravitational field than a solar mass at 1 billion light years.<p>Presumably a sudden mass-energy conversion of said kilogram would generate a sharp gravitational wave. Assuming someone went back through LIGOs algorithms to fine tune them for such a detection, doesn't it seem plausible that it would be able to do so? And presumably even locate it?
> ...meaning that energy equivalent to about 1 solar mass was emitted as gravitational waves during the collision.<p>Damn. That's something like 179 100 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 J<p>That's an insane amount of energy. It's equivalent to what you would get if you converted the entire mass of the sun into pure energy.
One question I've had about gravitational wave detections that I haven't yet been able to find an answer to is what is the mechanism by which the mass of an orbiting black hole pair converts its mass into a gravitational wave? Presumably the mass of the black holes is comprised of matter (in whatever form that may be) and kinetic energy. Is the gravitational wave energy while the two objects orbit purely a conversion of kinetic energy to gravitational wave energy or is some of the mass lost too? What about when they finally collide? If in this case 1 solar mass of matter was converted into gravitational energy then by what process?
Posting this whenever there's a new detection! Dr Roy Williams who's part of the LIGO team has put the notebooks used for analyzing the data online for anyone to check out & run:<p><a href="https://notebooks.azure.com/roywilliams/libraries/LIGOOpenScienceCenter" rel="nofollow">https://notebooks.azure.com/roywilliams/libraries/LIGOOpenSc...</a><p>Click Clone to get your own copy, then edit/run/etc.
Interesting<p>This was a couple of days days before Virgo got online AND one of the Ligo detectors was undergoing a noise modelling test (its mirrors were being vibrated at the time)