... into a new state, with very concrete rumors about the detection of gravitational waves.
Assuming that this is all true, the gravitational observatory has directly witnessed the merger of two black holes.
via Lubos
added later: It really is all real and amazing and xkcd has already the details of what signals they received.
Btw the best blog post about LIGO is this one imho.
3 comments:
How often are events like this supposed to happen? 1/yr, 1/hr? How well can they resolve its location in the sky with only 3 detectors? I hope they answer these questions at the conference.
IF the rumors are true they actually got lucky; they were expecting to get a few signals from neutron star mergers and instead they got signals from a black hole merger.
>> how often
This is exactly the question LIGO will answer ...
>> location
... from what I read they can measure the time delay between detectors and from there determine (roughly) where it came from.
They got the detection before the official science run started. I hope the Perimeter announcement gives a little more detail than the NSF announcement did. Anyway, it's enough to brighten ones day a lot!
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