“Astronomers discover largest solar system” I got “The planet furthest from it’s star”.
1 Like
Pretty much, yup. As far as I can tell, it’s a single planet orbiting a star, so “largest” here really just refers to the distance between the star and its most distant planet.
2 Likes
The Moroccan city of Ouarzazate is powered by salt
1 Like
Stephen Hawking: ‘Things can get out of a black hole’
Or Black holes aren’t as black as there painted.
1 Like
We’ve, apparently, finally detected gravitational waves!
http://www.nature.com/news/einstein-s-gravitational-waves-found-at-last-1.19361
Still waiting for this to get past the science-by-press-release stage, but, anecdotally at least, this sounds like it might be the real deal.
9 Likes
I liked this bit:
But direct detection of the waves had to await the sensitivity achieved by Advanced LIGO, which can detect stretches and compressions of space-time that are as small as one part in 10^22 — comparable to a hair’s-width change in the distance from the Sun to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to the Solar System.
The detector design is quite clever.
3 Likes
Interferometers are amazing! The laser interferometer that demonstrated that the aether doesn’t exist fits on a desk, and would have been able to detect the motion of the Earth through the aether down to ~3 km/s, or one-tenth the speed of the Earth along its orbit. It would have been able to measure the motion of Pluto through the aether!
And this was in the 1880s.
5 Likes
I didn’t expect one of the most violent physical events ever to sound like, well, that…
Also @Kichae what would it have looked like, if we had been close®?
7 Likes
I was going to post about this when I got to a computer but you beat me to it. I had the pleasure of listening to a talk by some of Caltech and csu Fullerton researchers who work with LiGo not too long ago…my favorite part of the talk was hearing the different sounds of different types of collisions and interactions.
I remember them saying they were in the process of cooking the sensors to reduce noise and I wonder if that’s the change that allowed them to make the measurement. @Kichae has a paper been released? Or at least an official document… I haven’t been able to find one except for news stories.
Edit: scratch that I didn’t realise you linked to nature. That works for me.
Beat me to it also 
. gravity particles and waves in such a short time, wow.
Last I herd was another check to make it confirmed.
Will this lead to us better understanding what gravity is. And maybe onto the path of finally creating gravity plate (floors) for the decks of our space craft, so human kind can really start to travel our solar system in comfort.
I believe that’s actually slowed down. The actual signals detected lasted for something like 0.25 seconds, IIRC. And that’s not really the sound, of course. It’s just the audio equivalent of the frequency of the gravity waves. Each wave corresponds to 1/2 of a rotation of the black hole pair.
I don’t know exactly what it would have looked like, exactly. Visualizing black holes is still in its early days. I mean, think of the black hole in Interstellar; the studio basically bought a pimped out GPU cluster in order to render that thing at the low, low cost of 10s, if not 100s, of thousands of dollars. For the most part, it would look like two black, kinda shiny balls orbiting around each other, getting closer and closer, and their orbits getting faster and faster as they approach, until they touch event horizons and just kinda “slurp” each other up, like connecting water droplets.
Kip Thorne is the man who provided the black hole model for Interstellar, by the way, and here is a video of Thorne discussing the collision of black holes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42cqhjmt4vs
If you fast forward to 4:20, he has a rather bare bones simulation of a black hole merger (and you can see the gravity wave profile at the bottom of his video, which is what was used to make that “whoop” sound!)
4 Likes
Here’s a really clear, well written mainstream news article on today’s announcement:
Sort of glossed over in some of the other news articles I’ve ready today, but which stands out a bit more here, is that this isn’t just strong evidence for gravitational waves, but it’s also a rare piece of evidence for the existence of intermediate mass black holes, which are one of those “we’re pretty sure they exist… maybe?” things in astronomy today.
5 Likes
I have found this interactive simulation demo about merging black holes on YouTube.
Wish I can play it now.
2 Likes
Ground control bids farewell to Philae comet lander Sad 
2 Likes
The Sky at Night -
Planet 9 from Outer Space - 14th Feb 2016 (BBC Iplayer)
Very interesting show this month. I hope there is a 9th planet somewhere out there and is observed in the not to distant future. An I wonder what it will be made of, a rock like planet with little or no atmosphere. or maybe a medium gas giant. I’m sure a few years from now we will know a lot more, and I look forward to that time.
So what time IS it on Earth? (the original Earth, not to be confused with others)
Well that’s obviously. It’s clearly now
3 Likes
I’m of the opinion that it is all times. 
That’s what I said but I’m told it’s wrong now?