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The Earth is flooded with gravitational waves.
Over a six-month period, scientists captured a size of 39 series of gravitational waves. The waves, which stretch and compress the fabric of spacetime, were caused by violent events such as the merging of two black holes into one.
The loot was reported by scientists with the LIGO and Virgo experiments in several studies published Oct. 28 on a collaboration website and on arXiv.org. The addition brings the count of known gravitational wave events to 50.
The bevy of data, which includes sightings from April to October 2019, suggests that scientists’ gravitational wave detection capabilities have risen. Prior to this research cycle, only 11 events had been detected in the years since the effort began in 2015. Improvements to the detectors: two that make up the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, in the United States, and another , Virgo, Italy – have drastically increased the rate of sightings of gravitational waves.
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While the colliding black holes produced most of the ripples, some collisions appear to have involved neutron stars, nuggets of ultra-dense matter left behind when stars explode.
Some of the events added to the gravitational wave log had previously been reported individually, including the largest black hole collision seen so far (SN: 9/2/20) and a collision between a black hole and an object that could not be identified as a neutron star or black hole (SN: 6/23/20).
Gravitational waves are produced when two massive objects, such as black holes, spiral and merge. These visualizations, based on computer simulations, show these objects merging for 38 of the 50 known gravitational wave events.
Additionally, some of the coaling black holes appear to be very large and rotate rapidly, says astrophysicist Richard O’Shaughnessy of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, a member of the LIGO collaboration. This is something “really compelling in the data now that we haven’t seen before,” he says. Such information could help reveal the processes by which black holes are associated before colliding (SN: 6/19/16).
Scientists also used the rich assortment of smashups to further verify Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity, which predicts the existence of gravitational waves. When tested with the new data – surprise, surprise – Einstein was the winner.
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