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Cosmic Vibrations From Black-Holes 3 Billion Light-Years Away... http://ift.tt/2rIYj03 “We’re starting to fill in the mass spectrum of black holes in the universe,” said David Reitze, director of the LIGO Laboratory, a smaller group of scientists headquartered at Caltech who built and run the observatory. The National Science Foundation, which poured $1 billion into LIGO over 40 years, responded with pride. “This is exactly what we hoped for from N.S.F.’s investment in LIGO: taking us deeper into time and space in ways we couldn’t do before the detection of gravitational waves,” Frances Cordova, the foundation’s director, said in a statement. “In this case, we’re exploring approximately 3 billion light-years away!” In the latest LIGO event, a black hole 19 times the mass of the sun and another black hole 31 times the sun’s mass, married to make a single hole of 49 solar masses. During the last frantic moments of the merger, they were shedding more energy in the form of gravitational waves than all the stars in the observable universe. A simulation of an event known as GW170104, a merger of two black holes, and how it warped space-time. LIGO/Caltech/MIT/SXS Collaboration After a
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