Scientists Have Recorded the Sound of Two Black Holes Colliding, and You Can Hear It Too

Author: Philip Perry / Source: Big Think

Something happened 3 billion years ago that changed the makeup of our prodigious universe forever. Two enormous black holes collided, resulting in an intense explosion and forming a solitary object 49 times as massive as our sun.

The explosion formed and released energy two times our sun’s mass within a fraction of a second.

This sent out gravitation waves so powerful that they altered the fabric of space-time itself. A super-massive black hole arose in the aftermath. Scientists were recently able to detect this cataclysmic collision, and are learning more about black holes and the cosmos as a result.

The National Science Foundation’s cutting-edge gravitational wave observatory made these detections. The facility is called the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). It’s run by an international group of scientists including some from NASA, MIT, and Caltech.

LIGO has two different locations, one in Hanford, Washington State and the other near Livingston, Louisiana. They’re purposely 1,800 miles (approx. 2,896 km) apart. The gravity waves were incredibly subtle. They altered space on and around Earth at just a fraction of the width of a proton. Yet, the instrumentation is so sensitive it can pick up such delicate occurrences.

LIGO.

An interferometer is basically a laser-based measuring instrument that can detect gravitational waves and locate their origin. By carefully observing light and space with two gigantic interferometers, researchers can learn much more about gravity, one of the four main forces of the universe.

LIGO scientists say, these dual observatories are on the same level of complexity as the large hadron collider (LHC) at CERN. LIGO is liable to make discoveries that’ll impact quantum mechanics, relativity, astronomy, and even nuclear physics.

This is the third time gravity waves have been detected using instruments on Earth and the first direct measurement. We now know more about stellar mass black holes, how they’re formed, the areas which they inhabit, and how two of them can end up in a spinning dance of death and merge. In this particular case, one was about 30…

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