Gravitational Waves: From Discovery Of The Year To Science Of The Century

[Krank]

From the article by Ethan Siegel...


"LIGO is back online and taking data right now at even greater sensitivity to 2015-2016. Among the things it hopes to see are:

--Increased statistics of the types of mergers already seen.

--Merging black holes of larger (up to 100) and smaller (down to 3 or 4) solar masses.

--Mismatched mergers, where two black holes of significantly different masses merge together.

--Neutron star mergers, where two collapsed objects left over from supernovae -- but too small to form a black hole -- spiral in and merge.

--Gravitational waves from "spike" events such as pulsar glitches, starquakes, and potentially even asymmetrical supernovae.

--And, hopefully, to correlate gravitational wave observations with electromagnetic ones, to find out which gravitational-wave producing events produce X-rays, Gamma rays, radio waves and light of any type!

All of this might come to be in just the next year or two. After a century of gravitational darkness, we've truly entered the era of gravitational wave astronomy.

But this new scientific field isn't just about the detectors we have today. As VIRGO, KAGRA and other gravitational wave detectors come online around the globe, we'll be able to pinpoint exactly where these events occur. We can do follow-up observations across the light spectrum and gravitational wave spectrum simultaneously. We can choose to build gravitational wave detectors in space, allowing us to see the mergers of supermassive black holes. We can even see stable orbits around them, where the effects of General Relativity matter the most. We can put Einstein's greatest theory to even stronger tests than we've ever subjected them to before. We can look for gravitational waves left over from the birth of the Universe."




http://www.forbes.com/sites/startswi.../#479662966df2

[dan_bgblue]

Earlier research on gravitational waves this year, helped to add another FACT into the THEORY of relativity. Observations proved the math of part of the equations dealing with the bending of space time. Cool stuff, but the coming research will be greater than that imo.