4 ms·
Do you have a reference to what the shape of these gravity waves would be like? Intuitively, I would guess they'd be star-cracking in magnitude, if the shape sn
by HCIdivision17 12y ago
Do you have a reference to what the shape of these gravity waves would be like? Intuitively, I would guess they'd be star-cracking in magnitude, if the shape snaps that hard. Like, black holes smashing into each other is bad, but the snap from going from a peanut to a pill shape must be utterly catastrophic (I honestly haven't any appropriate adjectives for this - black holes sort of exist as stable catastrophies...)
- antognini 12y agoYes, you don't want to be anywhere near the black holes as this happens. The strength of gravitational waves is measured by its "strain." The strain is the fractional change in length due to the gravitational wave. Gravitational wave detectors like LIGO are trying to measure strains of ~10^-20, so the distance between two points a light-year apart would change by ~0.1 mm. Obviously this is a very subtle effect. But near the merging black holes the strain is ~1. So if you start out 2 meters tall you will end up 4 meters tall in about 1 second.