LIGO detects most massive black hole merger to date

https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/ligo-detects-most-massive-black-hole-merger-to-date

by Eduard • 1 year ago

360 191 1 year ago

perdomon• 1 year ago

What happens when black holes collide? Does one black hole “consume” the other? Do they become a larger black hole? Does it get more dense or just larger?

chasil2• 1 year ago

What happens inside cannot be known.

As I understand it, black holes are defined by three quantities: mass, spin, and charge.

I'm assuming that these quantities will be additive post-merger.

Edit: "The black holes appear to be spinning very rapidly—near the limit allowed by Einstein's theory of general relativity."

Perhaps the additive spin becomes asymptotic. Alternately, the gravitational waves might have departed with the energy of the excess spin.

jameskilton• 1 year ago

My basic understanding is that they combine, basically you just add the masses together. That increased mass then means more gravity, so the event horizon is pushed further out.

__MatrixMan__2• 1 year ago

They become a more massive one. The volume of a black hole (assuming you're measuring at the event horizon) is determined only by its mass, so the final density is the same as you'd get for any other black hole of that mass regardless of how it came to be.

I don't know how to address the "consume" question. If you were pulling on a piece of fabric and two tears in it grew until they met each other to become one tear... would you say that the larger one consumed the smaller?

a012• 1 year ago

I think the GP meant “merge”

dataflow2• 1 year ago

The volume of a black hole (assuming you're measuring at the event horizon) is determined only by its mass, so the final density is the same as you'd get for any other black hole of that mass regardless of how it came to be.

Wait, really? So if you had a super massive disk that was just 1 electron away from having enough mass to become a black hole... and then an electron popped into existence due to quantum randomness... then it would become a sphere instantly? Wouldn't that violate the speed of light or something?

gus_massa6• 1 year ago

the "consume" question

My guess is that in some popular depictions black holes are like holes, and things fall in the holes, and even a small black hole can possible fall inside a bigger hole.

A better image is too drops of water on a glass, add some black ink for bonus realism. They merge into a bigger drop. Except, obviously black holes are not filled with water. And the "average density" of the new black hole is smaller then the "average density" of both original black holes, unlike the density of water drops on a glass. So don't take this image too literaly.

(There are some problems to define the "density" of a black hole, but let's ignore all of them.)

Iwan-Zotow3• 1 year ago

"The volume of a black hole" and how you define it?

hnuser1234568• 1 year ago

They become a larger black hole, mostly conserving mass, minus a few percent to gravitational waves. However, their mass is proportional to their radius, not volume, so it gets LESS dense. If you laid out a bunch of black holes in a line, just barely not touching, and let them merge, suddenly, the whole sphere of space enclosing the line becomes black hole. It also turns out that a black hole with the mass of the universe would have a volume about the size of the universe.

JumpCrisscross2• 1 year ago

turns out that a black hole with the mass of the universe would have a volume about the size of the universe

Mass and energy.

itronitron• 1 year ago

> just barely not touching

Which part of them is barely not touching?

pantalaimon2• 1 year ago

minus a few percent to gravitational waves

They actually convert up to 42% of their mass into energy, mostly radiation

https://youtu.be/t-O-Qdh7VvQ

ars4• 1 year ago

My understanding is they just spiral into each other forever.

From our point of view nothing can actually fall into a black hole, instead it time dilates into nothing. "It is true that objects that encounter the event horizon of a black hole would appear “frozen” in time"[1]

So we would never actually see the black holes merge. In fact I'm not clear how a black hole can even form in the first place, since it would take an infinite amount of time to do so (again, from our POV).

(And yes, I know that from the POV of the falling object, they just fall in like normal. But that doesn't help us, because we'll never see it.)

[1] https://public.nrao.edu/ask/does-an-observer-see-objects-fro...

ajross• 1 year ago

This is true, but it's not an observable distinction. It's true that in some sense those two black holes "haven't yet collided", but at this point they're well past the point of last observability and have now red shifted and time dilated into the invisible background. All the interesting stuff happens before that.

cloudrkt• 1 year ago

I wonder how the singularities would merge with each other.

Enginerrrd• 1 year ago

We can't REALLY answer questions about what's inside the event horizon, but some real work has been done on what BH mergers look like, though even that as I understand, is extremely difficult model.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5AkT4bPk-00

TechDebtDevin• 1 year ago

What are the waves of gradient colors, gravity?

20k2• 1 year ago

These kinds of simulations inherently cannot model the singularity accurately whatsoever. At the singularity, the numerical technique used becomes knowingly invalid

In fact, the entire interior of the event horizon is actually physically invalid in these simulations. The formalisms used trap the errors inside the event horizon, as the errors turn out to be strictly causal. And because of that, theoretically they can't escape

Of course that analysis breaks down in the face of discretisation, so errors tend to leak out a bit under low resolutions, so you have to handle things pretty careful. Either way, you shouldn't draw any conclusions about the interior

Source: I've done a lot of these simulations

MattPalmer10863• 1 year ago

I wonder what would happen if one black hole shot through another one at high relativistic velocity, instead of spiralling towards one another.

fsmv• 1 year ago

They would merge and produce a black hole with the sum of their momentums

Because nothing can ever leave the event horizon black holes are essentially perfectly sticky.

mkw50532• 1 year ago

So, if two black holes, each with mass M, were moving at nearly the speed of light and collided head-on (resulting in a final velocity of zero), what would happen to all that momentum? Would the resulting black hole have a mass greater than 2M? If so, how and why would this occur?

fooker3• 1 year ago

Because nothing can ever leave the event horizon black holes are essentially perfectly sticky.

If Hawking radiation turns out to be non existent, yes.

Also, we don't know if it's possible to 'crack' open a black hole. If anything, another black hole might be the perfect instrument for doing this.

labster• 1 year ago

black holes are essentially perfectly sticky

Black Hole brand adhesive: when you absolutely, positively need something stuck down for eternity.

MattPalmer10863• 1 year ago

What if the collision was only a grazing one, not head on?

Would they still fully merge, or might you get a mass exchange between them? Or even a smaller black hole spun off?

snowwrestler• 1 year ago

The escape velocity from inside the event horizon is faster than the speed of light, which is the highest possible speed in the universe.

So black holes cannot approach each other faster than the speed of light. And if their trajectories intersect perfectly, they won’t be able to escape each other’s gravity.

A black hole can’t pass “through” another black hole like two bullets hitting each other. More like two incredibly strong magnets hitting each other in midair.

MaxikCZ• 1 year ago

The thing is that the spacetime around blackholes get curved to the actual extremes.

When we imagine flying "at nearly the speed of light" towards something thats traveling the same speed towards you, we tend to imagine a collision at high speeds.

But for blackholes that turn space into time and time into space, they can see the other blackhole slowing to a complete stop as its about to touch. Or it can look differently, it all depends on the position and speed of an observer.

We cant even agree on the basics like: "It doesnt matter how it looks, but they must collide", since if we look at something falling into a blackhole (which I pressume could be another blackhole just as well), we see it slow towards 0 at the edge and fade away in redshift instead of seeing it actually fall trough.

Its just all very weird and unintuitive stuff.

veunes5• 1 year ago

Too bad we can't set up a cosmic particle accelerator to test this!

ChrisArchitect• 1 year ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44555220

mnemonk• 1 year ago

Man, that is some seriously interesting phenomena:

"The black holes appear to be spinning very rapidly—near the limit allowed by Einstein's theory of general relativity," explains Charlie Hoy of the University of Portsmouth and a member of the LVK. "That makes the signal difficult to model and interpret. It's an excellent case study for pushing forward the development of our theoretical tools."

veunes5• 1 year ago

It's like nature handed us a stress test for general relativity

amelius• 1 year ago

Does the spinning of a spherical object cause any gravitational waves?

NL807• 1 year ago

The rotating mass drags space time around it, called frame dragging, which is different from gravitational waves. Gravitational waves consists of oscillations, which is caused by change of mass, wobbling of spinning objects, or several masses orbiting around a barycentre.

WrongOnInternet• 1 year ago

the 225-solar-mass black hole was created by the coalescence of black holes each approximately 100 and 140 times the mass of the Sun.

Does this mean that 15 solar masses were converted into energy? Because that's a LOT of energy.

andrepd• 1 year ago

Yes! And still, gravity is so weak that that immense amount of energy translates to just a relative contraction of less than 10^-20, or about a hair's width in the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

cgdl• 1 year ago

Do we know how far this event was from earth? Wouldn't that distance be the determiner of what the relative contraction observed on earth would be?

UltraSane2• 1 year ago

At 10 times the Schwarzschild radius Space literally stretches and contracts by 10-100%

ssl232• 1 year ago

This is because space is _stiff_. Recall Hooke’s law from high school physics. The k constant represents the stiffness of the object. A rubber band is about 50. A sky scraper, about a million. Space? About 10^46 if I recall correctly. So it takes a truly enormous amount of energy in the form of gravitational waves to be able to move space enough for it to be detectable on Earth. And the only objects that can do that are the most massive ones moving at close to the speed of light: black holes, neutron stars, supernovae (the latter would have to be very close for us to see gravitational waves from - close enough that we’d likely see it with the naked eye as well).

misja1112• 1 year ago

Sure but we are 7 billion lightyears away from the source of the waves. Imagine if we'd be a bit closer ..

UltraSane2• 1 year ago

Yes. Black hole mergers are the highest energy events in the universe in terms of watts.

aaronharnly4• 1 year ago

Let’s see — the Tsar Bomba nuclear weapon released the equivalent of converting about 2.3 kg of matter into energy (1).

One solar mass is about 2 x 10^30 kg, so round numbers this event released the same as 10^31 Tsar Bombas, which is … a lot of energy? That number is too big to be a good intuition pump.

Let’s try again: over the course of its entire lifetime of about 10 billion years, the sun will release about 0.034% of its mass as energy (2). So one solar mass of energy is about 3000 solar-lifetime-outputs.

So this event has released about as much energy as 45,000 suns over their entire lifetime. I’m not sure how much of the energy was released in the final few seconds of merger, but probably most of it? So… that’s a lot of energy.

(1) https://faculty.etsu.edu/gardnerr/einstein/e_mc2.htm

(2) https://solar-center.stanford.edu/FAQ/Qshrink.html

vjvjvjvjghv2• 1 year ago

I have read somewhere that an experiencing a supernova at sun distance would be the same as holding a hydrogen bomb to your eyeball. The energy released in these events is basically unimaginable.

spuz• 1 year ago

Assuming your 0.034% figure is correct, then one solar mass is equivalent to 2941 lifetimes of a sun's output, not 30. So 15 solar masses would be more like 44115 solar-lifetimes.

lxe• 1 year ago

Is it physically limiting for a theoretical civilization to harness and use such energy?

ChuckMcM• 1 year ago

Yeah, it's alot alot :-). Over on Mastodon I asked Phil Plait (@badastro) if the "missing mass" in the universe might be a result of black holes converging[1]. He wrote up this event in his newsletter[2] and points out that when they merge, they emit more energy in that instant than every single start in the universe in the same instant. So kind of like an instant of double energy. Hard to fathom how much energy that is with my meager mammalian brain.

[1] https://mastodon.social/@badastro/114852139083587160

[2] https://badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/the-biggest-black-hole-me...

randomtoast• 1 year ago

this event released the same as 10^31 Tsar Bombas, which is … a lot of energy? That number is too big to be a good intuition pump

Let me try:

To match this power with sequentially detonated bombs, one would need to set off about 10^13 Tsar Bombas (or one hydrogen bomb scaled up to 5% the mass of the Moon) every second since the Big Bang to match it. With that amount of energy, you could essentially destroy earth every second since the Big Bang.

dd_xplore2• 1 year ago

Also to put in perspective, most of the mass isn't converted to energy in either nuclear or hydrogen bombs, it's just the bond energy. Pure energy for a given quantity of matter is released only in case of annihilation-like event(merging with anti matter). So even fusion releases max 0.7% energy of the mass

I'm not sure what happens in black hole merger.. is it an annihilation like event or is just fusion...

steve_adams_862• 1 year ago

It's humbling to consider what an incredibly low-energy state we humans live in. The universe is capable of such immense energetic outputs. We're humming along at energy levels approaching zero compared to most bodies floating around in space. Crazy.

hansulu• 1 year ago

I was disappointed to learn that it would require billions of solar masses of energy from a black hole merger to be able to ride the gravitational wave starting at a distance of a few Schwarzschild radii. It seems like riding a plasma jet might be better.

(Just planning my next trip.)

pixl97• 1 year ago

Much better off just chucking 90% of your mass into the blackhole to get a hella kick.

tashmahalic• 1 year ago

Into what form of energy is that mass converted?

BurningFrog4• 1 year ago

Maybe all of it is gravitational waves?

I don't think much else would escape the black hole environment.

csomar• 1 year ago

Pure energy.

doikor• 1 year ago

Can some of the mass escape as gas/mass flying out into space? Basically is energy the only way for mass to exit such an event?

Thiez3• 1 year ago

No mass escapes. It is purely gravitational waves that are emitted. There is no sneak peek behind the event horizon curtain during a black-hole merger.

veunes5• 1 year ago

It's hard to wrap your head around, but that's more energy than all the stars in the observable universe combined put out during that instant

richardw• 1 year ago

Converted into energy and then escape the black hole, from which light can’t escape? That doesn’t seem to compute. And if it’s converted into gravity waves then we have an excellent obvious candidate for how most energy will escape a black hole. It won’t be waiting around for hawking radiation.

dd_xplore2• 1 year ago

I think during the merger the event horizon must be changing rapidly, so I guess there's some(or a lot) of chance that matter can escape these merger events. The matter will already have high kinetic energy...

BurningFrog4• 1 year ago

I've always thought the event horizon for a black hole has to be spherical.

But my physics intuition tells me that as two of them merge, the resulting BH should have a "peanut" shape, at least initially.

And maybe it can keep having an irregular shape, depending on the mass distribution inside it?

itishappy2• 1 year ago

It's only spherical in a Schwarzschild (non-rotating) black hole. A rotating black hole is called a Kerr black hole, and stuff gets weird, such as there being an oblate event horizon, a weird outer horizon called an ergosphere where spacetime gets dragged along such that it's impossible to stand still and you can accelerate objects using the black hole, a weirder inner horizon called the Cauchy horizon where time travel is possible, and a singularity in the shape of a ring. Your intuition is correct that during a merger it would be weirder still.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerr_metric

https://arxiv.org/pdf/0706.0622

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergosphere

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy_horizon

Edit: Updated the bit about about horizons as I research a bit more. It's complicated, and I'm still not positive I have it exactly right, but I think it's now as good as I can get it.

AnimalMuppet3• 1 year ago

Could you (or anyone) tell what the radius of the ring singularity is, in terms of mass and angular momentum? I haven't been able to find that.

CGMthrowaway• 1 year ago

Simulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr1zDVbSjTM

TMEHpodcast2• 1 year ago

No matter how chaotic the merger looks, the event horizon must asymptotically become either spherical (Schwarzschild) or oblate (Kerr). The mass distribution inside doesn’t change this, general relativity doesn’t allow static “lumpy” horizons.

It’s wild how much happens in those milliseconds though. Numerical relativity papers like the one you shared from arxiv.org show the horizon “sloshing” before it stabilizes.

captainkrtek• 1 year ago

Here is an animation from MIT/CalTech of what a merger looks like:

https://youtu.be/1agm33iEAuo

chasil2• 1 year ago

Does the black hole's spin deform the event horizon?

I think so?

https://archive.ph/VrzwW

Edit: "The Kerr metric also predicts the existence of an inner and outer event horizon, with the shape of these horizons being oblate rather than perfectly spherical due to the rotation."

mr_toad4• 1 year ago

Kind of. Because the black hole drags space around with it you need to go faster near the ‘equator’ than the poles just to stand still. So the event horizon is fatter at the equator.

micw• 1 year ago

Is there a "mass distribution" inside? AFAIK a black hole is a singularity which means it's mass is in one (infinitely small) point.

BlackFly• 1 year ago

It is difficult to talk about the shape of the event horizon because the ordinary definition of a sphere is "surface where all points are equidistant from a given point" is already complex in a differentiable manifold, but even more so when the distance is infinite because of a singularity (or the point doesn't exist/isn't unique because of geodesic structure). So you switch to a definition of "surface of constant scalar curvature with the topology of a sphere", the topology being important to distinguish it from a plane and a hyperboloid.

From there, I haven't personally done or seen the calculations of the shape of the horizon for Kerr or merging black holes, but my intuition is that it would be indeed peanut shaped for a merger (there are likely some saddle points). The coordinate shape certainly is but you can choose coordinates so that a Schwarzschild black hole is a coordinate peanut so coordinates aren't very meaningful.

Permik• 1 year ago

I'm no physicist but what I've learned on the internet through osmosis, I'd wager that black holes aren't spherical per-se, but they appear sphere-like to us dimensionally challenged beings. It's more like a manifold (mobius-gate? not a mobius surface), that changes your spatial directions to parallel temporal directions to spatial ones all leading to the singularity.

veunes5• 1 year ago

But black holes are incredibly efficient at radiating away asymmetries via gravitational waves

fpoling• 1 year ago

From our perspective there is no event horizon since the collapsing star has not reached the black hole state. In fact it takes infinite amount of time from the point of view of an external observer for the event horizon to form.

In almost all situations it does matter as the collapsing star will behave as it is a black hole. But for the merge of black holes it is significant as it allows to release energy as there is no event horizon.

kens• 1 year ago

A month ago, the proposed NSF budget would shut down one of the two LIGO observatories in the US, wrecking its ability to triangulate the location of events such as this black hole merger. A shutdown would also severely damage the noise margins and detection rate. Does anyone know if the shutdown is still planned? (I couldn't find any recent info.)

https://www.science.org/content/article/trump-s-proposed-cut...

ac794• 1 year ago

I believe the proposed budget is being marked up tomorrow (July 15th, 12:00). Currently the NSF budget is set to be ~$7 billion, a 23% cut compared to FY2025. I'm not sure how this affects LIGO exactly.

https://appropriations.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republic...

amarcheschi2• 1 year ago

I had read something less recent than what you posted, but in that is said about 40% of ligo funding would be cut https://www.science.org/content/article/trump-s-proposed-cut...

Then again, your file has less drastic reductions on nsf budget so who knows what would be the impact on ligo

jedberg• 1 year ago

I believe the proposed budget is being marked up tomorrow (July 15th, 12:00)

Interesting that they break this news today. Props to them for playing the game.

amarcheschi2• 1 year ago

I was last week at an event in Pisa at virgo ego (basically ligo's cousin). It was to celebrate the 10th anniversary of finding gravitational waves iirc. There were an actress reading from the book the director of the Italian program wrote accompanied by the sound of waves made with sax. I can't describe it with words but it was truly moving.

There were also moments dedicated to interviewing a science communicator and the director of the virgo center, and he was, let's say, quite angry at the thought of ligo losing funding. Rightfully so

TMEHpodcast2• 1 year ago

Keep an eye on whether the final FY 2026 appropriations bill keeps LIGO at two sites. Until then, it’s a real risk, but salvageable.

BurningFrog4• 1 year ago

So maybe that is why this discovery from 2023 gets published right now.

gus_massa6• 1 year ago

I think all the previous events were announced with a big delay. They have a long pipeline of checks. The signals have too much noise and it's difficult not to cheat and find fake signals in the noise. IIRC they even have a team that adds secretly fake signals to ensure the pipeline is working and after it's detected the team disclose if it's real or fake, before publication.

robin_reala2• 1 year ago

Given that there’s a handful of gravitational-wave observatories running globally at this point, why does the closure of one LIGO wreck triangulation?

agos• 1 year ago

the collaboration to be able to triangulate is composed of LIGO, Virgo and now KAGRA. KAGRA is not yet fully ready for longer observation runs, so for now it's basically LIGO and Virgo - and if you take offline one of three, triangulation becomes nearly useless

HocusLocus• 1 year ago

Chirps or it didn't happen

HenryBemis• 1 year ago

When I read 'news' like that, I 'compare' myself to the thing. And then I think how this 'thing' can swallow me, everyone around me, everything as far as the eye can see (thank you light pollution, we can only see the moon and perhaps 5-6 more 'things' out there (ffs!)) and then we will be 'no more'.

But then I use the voice of Djimon Hounsou and the quote from the Gladiator "but not just yet".

croemer• 1 year ago

Boring press release without any real details. I wish the paper would trend not an empty press release announcing the announcement.

veunes5• 1 year ago

Kind of amazing that LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA can even detect and decode something that extreme

ck23• 1 year ago

even the "sound" is spooky

https://www.youtube.com/embed/QyDcTbR-kEA

jcims• 1 year ago

In case it's not clear, that 'chirp' is exactly what we would hear if the merger was powerful enough to actually be detectable by our ears. It's the vibration induced in the final moments and the frequency is the speed at which the blackholes are orbiting each other before they merge. Things the size of multiples of our Sun dancing around each other a thousand times per second. It's insane to me.

ck23• 1 year ago

so I hate to have to ask this but must

is the space version of LIGO, known as LISA (and will be far more sensitive)

now doomed? because of the "savings" by DOGE?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Interferometer_Space_Ant...

pantalaimon2• 1 year ago

This is a project by ESA, it's not affected by DOGE

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/LISA/C...

ck23• 1 year ago

LISA is (was?) listed as a joint NASA-ESA project

Both LISA and LIGO II were deleted from the last Congressional budget

https://lisa.nasa.gov/

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/ligo-heaviest-black-...

m3kw9• 1 year ago

Everything in the universe is massive because we are just so small. Everywhere but within the confines of our solar system, calling something massive is a meaningless endeavour, it’s so big nobody has any idea how to appreciate it, and then there is always going to be something bigger which makes that black hole look tiny

phtrivier2• 1 year ago

I'm in dire need of good news, so help me see it in an optimistic lens: can you imagine a path (even very indirect) where this kind of discovery ends up having a practical use that makes real life better here on Earth ?

(I'm not in the age-old debate about "is research useful ?" - I agree the answer is yes ; I just have a failure of imagination that prevents me from answer the question "how is this research going to be useful in the long run ?")

beng-nl• 1 year ago

Just an amateur interested person here, but I think there is something very positive about these developments. There are probably more, that experts can chime in on, but one I know about is that gravitational waves can give us a signal of what happened when the universe came into existence. The cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) is a similar thing with photons - it is a signal from the earliest photons to be emitted after the Big Bang / inflation. But the universe was opaque to photons for the first 300000 or so years. Even so cosmological theories have been confirmed and falsified based on this data. But gravitational waves are signals that originated right from the start, and are not blocked by anything unlike photons, and so likely give us much clearer information on the state of the universe when it was created. This might make new insights in fundamental physics possible (quantum mechanics, relativity).

This overlaps with the fascinating topic of multi-messenger astronomy: observing an event using photons, neutrinos, and now: gravitational waves, leading to triple-messenger astronomy, leading to (hand waves) more insights than.. otherwise.

How this might make real life better ln earth: that is a gamble, but progress in fundamental physics has frequently made life better on earth.

I wish you All the best in feeling better about the world.

NooneAtAll3• 1 year ago

practical< usefulness of this type of research isn't results per se - but methods of getting to them

LIGO needs extremely precise lasers, stationary platforms, extreme positioning precision, tons of supporting software - even if things "exist", the _need_ for results provide advances and improvements

astronomy itself already gave us cmos sensors (aka digital cameras) - but using your phone camera doesn't really make you think "this is caused by distance measurement to the stars"

outworlder2• 1 year ago

but using your phone camera doesn't really make you think "this is caused by distance measurement to the stars"

Maybe it should!

There's so many technologies that we use today that derive from astronomy, space exploration and similar. We don't do a good job making that point to folks.

abdullahkhalids• 1 year ago

Most rich civilization, to show off how great they are, have built monuments. Basically saying, look we are so rich we can redirect a big part of our society's productivity to building a magnificent piece of art. Notice, how the ancient Egyptians are remembered thousands of years later.

You should think of some research in similar ways. This is us saying, look how rich and powerful we are, we can devote a significant part of our society's productivity on discovering the very essence of this universe with no practical benefit to us. Detecting blackhole mergers is an intellectual monument.

outworlder2• 1 year ago

"how is this research going to be useful in the long run ?"

We don't know.

However, black holes are close to the limit of our scientific knowledge. We don't know what happens on the other side of an event horizon (and we may never know, at least not experimentally). Learning more about them means learning more about the universe, and every once in a while we make a breakthrough that leapfrogs our technology. There's nothing else that we can do with so much potential.

Most of the time though, the progress is quite 'boring', at least if you are not in a related field.

favflam• 1 year ago

What is the budget outlook for LIGO?

Was the budget cut in the BBB passage last week?

LIGO detects most massive black hole merger to date

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