CapitalistImperialistPig

Sean has some more cool stuff on the LIGO accomplishment. A favorite quote: The fact that Einstein’s prediction has turned out to be right is an enormously strong testimony to the power of science in general, and physics in particular, to describe our natural world. Einstein didn’t know about black holes; he didn’t even know about lasers, although it was his work that laid the theoretical foundations for both ideas. He was working at a level of abstraction that reached as far as he could (at the time) to the fundamental basis of things, how our universe works at the deepest of levels. And his theoretical insights were sufficiently powerful and predictive that we could be confident in testing them a century later. This seemingly effortless insight that physics gives us into the behavior of the universe far away and under utterly unfamiliar conditions should never cease to be a source of wonder. The equations that Einstein wrote down predicted lasers, black holes, and gravitational ...

Lumo has an excellent post on the GR wave discovery. Highly recommended if you want some modestly technical detail. Here is a quote on the energy release: Kip Thorne has described the unbelievable power of the black hole merger differently. During the peak power, the black hole merger releases 50 times more watts in gravitational waves than all damn stars in the visible Universe combined. This is just shocking.

In principle, there is not much limit to black hole size. We expect little ones to evaporate quickly, but nobody has seen any of these. The ones we can measure are mostly big - several solar masses - or really really big - millions or billions of solar masses. We have a pretty good idea how the former form from the death throes of giant stars, but the latter are more mysterious. It's also surprising that we haven't measured any intermediate sized ones - a few hundred to a few thousands of solar masses - until now . The universe has so many black holes that it’s impossible to count them all. There may be 100 million of these intriguing astral objects in our galaxy alone. Nearly all black holes fall into one of two classes: big or colossal. Astronomers know that black holes ranging from about 10 times to 100 times the mass of our Sun are the remnants of dying stars and that supermassive black holes, more than a million times the mass of the Sun, inhabit the centers of most ga...