When Two Black Holes Collide
"....tugging at the space around them." My goodness, how profound is that?!
Last September, a small chirp rattled a pair of L-shaped antennas for the first time. That’s the sound you hear when there’s a ripple in the fabric of space and time – a gravitational wave. The wave is caused by two black holes colliding, circling each other at half the speed of sound, tugging at the space and time around them.
This December, scientists heard the chirp again, confirming Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity for the second time in recorded history.
David Reitze played a key role in the discovery. He’s the executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which operates the antennas in Louisiana and Washington state that picked up the waves.
“On a fundamental scale it changes the way we look at the universe,” he says. “So it’s a new kind of astronomy. And I think everybody can get excited about that.”
http://www.texasstandard.org/stories...holes-collide/