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And the more massive they are, the stronger the signal. Now that is dense! Also, neutron stars are limited to be no more than twice as massive as the sun. If the sun were a black hole, it would be only three kilometres across. None in such tight orbits as I just described, but we assume that we have only seen a tiny fraction of the total number out there. And the great thing about neutron-star binaries is that we have seen several already in the universe. We now have two massive objects moving very fast in a small space - a perfect gravitational-wave source. Since neutron stars are so small, they can orbit each other very close without touching - so close that they can orbit hundreds of times every second. Take the sun and squash it into a ball twenty kilometres across, and you’ve got something pretty much like a neutron star. A likely option would be two neutron stars in close orbit around each other. Producing a gravitational wave that we can detect requires a stupidly violent, intense astronomical event - we need massive objects moving extremely fast in tiny spaces. More about that later.įor gravitational-wave enthusiasts, the big question was not whether we would ever detect gravitational waves, but what the source would be. What we didn’t expect was that we would detect a signal before we even started. Or there could be so many that we found something in the first three months. There could have been so few that we would have had to run the detectors at their most sensitive for five years before we found anything - which could have been as late as 2025.
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(It wasn't - it was better!) The only question was when, and when depended on just how many loud sources there are out there. It had to happen eventually, so long as the detector was as sensitive as promised. That’s what we’ve been trying to do for decades. There are in fact three incredible observations here.įirst, we observed gravitational waves. We’re not.) I'll post more over the next few days. (The word “major” is meant as an understatement, in an effort to pretend that we’re cool about all this. I wrote quite a lot on what we have found, and what it means, and also what it has been like to be part of a major scientific discovery. In the same spirit of advance preparation, I wrote this in January, so that today I could concentrate on more urgent matters. The event we observed - two black holes whirling around each other before merging into one - occurred over a billion years ago. Before that, it took two decades to build the LIGO detectors. Since the 0.2-second-long blip appeared in the data in mid-September it has taken five months to verify and write up the results. Today we announced it to the world: we did it! We detected gravitational waves!