Andre F Nobrega

inlovewithkatemckinnon:

Reblog if you think Kate’s Ellen impression is SUBLIME.

oobiwan:

insp

startswithabang:

What Gravitational Wave Astronomy Will Teach Us About The Universe

“We’re right on the frontiers of opening up the Universe in a brand new way. The event of September 14th detected by LIGO was only the first of what’s sure to be a massive influx of new data that will teach us about the Universe in a form of energy we’ve never directly probed before. It’s time to embrace this new form of astronomy, and to open our window on the Universe as never before. It’s an incredible time for any curious minds to be alive.”

Now that LIGO’s successfully detected it’s first gravitational waves — from two merging black holes — we know that we will find them in a variety of circumstances if we look in the right way. While LIGO and its successors will be great for exploring high-frequency events like small black hole inspirals, neutron star mergers and cataclysmic supernovae, there are other classes of gravitational wave events to look for as well: supermassive black hole orbits, galaxy mergers and even the leftover gravitational wave background from cosmic inflation. Here’s how the future of gravitational wave astronomy can unlock the secrets of all of them.

rebekkadunlap:

Soundtrack of the Universe// Nature, April 2016 Books & Arts Special

The opening illustration for Nature’s Spring Book Review on the discovery of gravitational waves as told by Janna Levin in her book Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space.

(Many thanks to AD and Designer Wesley Fernandes!)

startswithabang:

Ask Ethan: do gravitational waves exhibit wave-particle duality?

“We’ve actually got a few chances for this, although LIGO is unlikely to succeed at any of them. You see, quantum gravitational effects are strongest and most pronounced where you have strong gravitational fields in play at very tiny distances. How better to probe this than for merging black holes?! When two singularities merge together, these quantum effects — which should be departures from General Relativity — will show up at the moment of the merger, and just before (at the end of the inspiral) and just after (at the start of the ringdown) phases.”

Now that gravitational waves have been verified to exist, and the first black hole-black hole merger has been definitively detected by LIGO, it’s time to start thinking of the next steps in gravitational wave astronomy. The biggest one we can dream of, perhaps the holy grail of this field of study, is to go beyond General Relativity itself, and to find evidence that gravitation is a truly quantum theory at its core. If that’s true, then these gravitational waves should exhibit wave-particle duality, just like all the other quantum entities we know of. In this case, detecting the wave-like phenomenon, which took a century to do, was the easy part; detecting the particle nature of gravitons will be the hard part. Nevertheless, even though this is likely beyond the reach of LIGO, future missions will have a chance to see these quantum effects down the road.

carolynporco:

This week we learned that a prediction made by the brilliant, staggeringly counter-intuitive theory of general relativity, formulated by Albert Einstein 100 years ago, has been confirmed.

A billion light-years across the universe, two massive black holes spiraled round and round each other, ever closer, ever faster, until they merged in an extremely brief but tremendous explosion of energy. In that fraction of an instant, more power was produced than that of all the stars in the cosmos, sending subtle ripples in the space-time continuum, of which we are a part, in all directions. A billion years later, on September 14, 2015, these disturbances were intercepted by detectors on Earth, marking the first time we have ever witnessed a gravitational wave.

This is the immense triumph of 50 years of scientific inquiry and technological experimentation, and a watershed in the history of human knowledge.

A new window on the cosmos has just opened. We will be peering through it forevermore.

LIGO: Gravitational Waves Detected 100 Years After Einstein’s Prediction

cosmicfunnies:

Bonus comic!

Yahoo! Einstein was right again! :D We now have our first detection of gravitational waves! 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/ligo-gravitational-waves-black-holes-einstein.html?_r=0

http://www.space.com/17661-theory-general-relativity.html