4 ms·
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
by 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 agoAgreed. The most important single fact (though there are many to be extracted here) is an estimate of the detectable merger rate.
- misnome 10y agoAlso, 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).