4 ms·
"LIGO and Virgo are not mechanically capable of detecting the collisions of supermassive black holes" Anyone have ideas why this might be?
by tehsauce 7y ago
"LIGO and Virgo are not mechanically capable of detecting the collisions of supermassive black holes"
Anyone have ideas why this might be?
- skykooler 7y agoThe larger black holes have a lower frequency chirp. Supermassive black holes would produce a peak frequency so low it gets filtered out as noise.
- ISL 7y agoIt isn't filtered out as noise, but rather drowned out by noise. See Figure 5a: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00439.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.00439.pdf
- dron57 7y agoBecause of the lower frequency that would result from the much larger mass collision of the supermassive black holes. Ideally we would have much longer travel distances for the gravity wave detection experiment. They work by building a giant interferometer with lasers pointed at mirrors that try to estimate how spacetime gets bent by the gravity wave. This should be easier to do with larger distances and less sources of noise in space. LISA is one such project. So hopefully in a couple of decades will know a lot more about supermassive black holes and other huge phenomena after detecting their gravity waves!