4 ms·

Can someone who has expertise explain the significance of this in plain English please?

• cheez 10y ago
  First time might be a fluke, second time might be a fluke, third time... The theory might be right. Basic science. Remember, this was imagined by some dude 100 years ago. That's nucking futs.
• jofer 10y ago
  I'm definitely not a good person to explain or comment on this, but in a nutshell: Black hole collisions were expected to be a fairly common occurrence, but we had no way of knowing for certain how frequent they are when only one had been detected. Now that another one has been detected a fairly short time afterwards, it supports the prediction that we should observe several of them every year. If black hole collisions were very rare events, it would be harder to use them as a natural laboratory. It's much easier to demonstrate that some small deviation from theory is real when you have multiple observations of it. Therefore, this second observation in a short time confirms that gravitational waves are likely to be a useful tool to explore fundamental physical principles.
  • batbomb 10y ago
    > Therefore, this second observation in a short time confirms that gravitational waves are likely to be a useful tool to explore fundamental physical principles. No, it just means there's a high probability that these events occur on a regular basis. Of course, "regular basis" really means we might be able to approach gaussian statistics within the lifetime of the experiment.
  • ISL 10y ago
    Agreed. The most important single fact (though there are many to be extracted here) is an estimate of the detectable merger rate.
  • misnome 10y ago
    Also, this event is much closer to what they would "Expect" e.g. a much more common predicted size of black holes; the first event was rather on the extreme end of things (which is why it was so much easier to see in the data).
• nabaraz 10y ago
  The end target is to measure gravitational waves of Big Bang and learn about the origin of universe. PS: Watch this brilliant video [1] if you want to know what gravitational waves are. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GbWfNHtHRg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GbWfNHtHRg
• CamperBob2 10y ago
  They didn't expect these events to be very common, so it was suspicious that they got a signal almost as soon as they turned the interferometer on. Receiving additional events will help reassure people who were afraid that the first result was a glitch of some kind. The more you read about how this particular instrument is constructed, the more incredulous you'll be that it could possibly work at all, or if it does, that it could pick up anything but noise. So it's very good news that these events are relatively common. (Well, good for the research teams at the LIGO installations, but bad for anyone within a few hundred light years of the events being detected.)
• fraserharris 10y ago
  The largest gravitational waves, emanating from black hole collisions, have now repeatedly been detected. Scientists can iterate on the design to build more sensitive detectors. This will give us a new way of studying the universe that doesn't rely on electromagnetic radiation (light, x-rays, etc). Perhaps it will lead to answers about the missing matter in the universe.