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Gravitational waves may have made human life possible
- sinuhe69 3y agoI find the title inaccurate and clickbaity. It was not the gravitational waves that made life on earth possible, but the heavy elements as a result of star collision and star collapse. But we've already known that for a long time. The referred paper just makes the case that most of the iodine and bromine on Earth must be created by neutron stars collisions and not by supernovae as previously thought.
- pfdietz 3y agoThat bromine is a necessary element was only discovered about a decade ago. It's apparently necessary to form weird sulfur-nitrogen double bonds in collagen IV. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4144415/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4144415/
- tanepiper 3y agoSo basically... causation caused us to exist?
- pfdietz 3y agoThere seems to be a correlation between us and causation.
- somenameforme 3y agoThere's even a terribly named term for it - the anthropic principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
- darby_eight 3y agoI don't think it's terribly named—causation isn't an inherent property of the universe but an abstraction used by humans to reason about the progression of time.
- ano-ther 3y agoThe paper seems to say that gravitational waves cause neutron stars to collide. Isn’t it the other way around? (A collision emits gravitational waves)? https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03593 https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03593
- hinoki 3y agoIs both. They cause gravitational waves, which is how the system gets rid of energy, which allows the orbits to decay, causing the collision (and more waves).
- ano-ther 3y agoThank you
- MattPalmer1086 3y agoTo be clear, the fact that the collision causes more waves does not seem to be relevant here. It is the loss of energy due to gravitational wave emission that causes the collision. Ambient gravitational waves from other sources do not seem to play a part?
- raverbashing 3y agoMaybe if you're close enough but probably not in the majority of cases Gravitational waves are really weak
- mistercow 3y agoIt’s always sort of weird to state something like this, because clearly any tiny change to the parameters of the universe would have had an enormous cumulative effect over billions of years, dramatically changing the conditions that led to human evolution. One tiny pebble hitting our atmosphere, or not, three billion years ago, would be a hell of a butterfly wing. On the other hand, can we confidently say that the presence of iodine and bromine is necessary for the emergence of intelligent life? Can we even say that it makes intelligent life more likely, rather than less? Evolution tends to make use of the resources that are available, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t stumble upon alternative solutions if they weren’t.
- secondcoming 3y agoIs there a gravitational equivalent of a 'rogue wave' that sometimes happens at sea?