N “Almost everything we know about the universe we have learned from light.”
The mega fusion of two black holes takes about 0.2 seconds.
ot much was happening on Earth on this day 1.3 billion years ago. The land was a monotonous wasteland devoid of plants and animals— without any life. Only in the planet’s oceans did a few multicellular organisms consider the alluring possibility of reproducing. Meanwhile, 1.3 billion light-years away (expressed in miles, it’s a number with more than 20 zeros), two black holes were on the verge of colliding. One of them had 36 times the mass of our Sun with a diameter of 134 miles, while the other had only 29 solar masses with a diameter of 108 miles. By way of comparison: The diameter of our Sun is around 864,000 miles. Up until the moment they collided, each of the two black holes had swallowed up everything available in its corner of the universe. Now only these two holes remained. They were circling each other faster and faster, reaching an unimaginable pace of 150 times per second.
The mega fusion lasted for just 0.2 seconds as the two monsters came together at 70% of the speed of light. In that fraction of a second, 10 times more radiant energy was released (some experts say 50 times more) than is produced by all the stars in the visible universe combined. Three times the mass of our Sun in the form of pure energy raced out into space at the speed of light, only to reach the Earth 1.3 billion years later—on September 14, 2015, to be exact— which fully rocked the world of astrophysics. This was the very first time any gravitational waves had ever been detected. Mind you: No one was in any way disturbed on that Monday in September as a result of this event— no one fell off a chair, no leaves stirred, even though Earth had just been hit by the shock wave of an enormous collision. Even so, two laser detectors, one in Livingston, Louisiana, the other in Hanford, Washington, did register the event—and in doing so opened up a totally new window onto the universe: “Up until now, almost everything that we know about the universe has come from electromagnetic waves,” says Greek astrophysicist Vicky Kalogera. Before this momentous event we were in the dark about gravitational waves: Theoretically they did exist but were never actually detected.
More than 100 years ago Albert Einstein had predicted the existence of gravitational waves: His general theory of relativity postulates that immense masses are capable of warping the unity of space and time, much as a ball resting on a rubber sheet creates a depression in it.
The incredible infinitely great mass of a black hole even has the power to warp space-time infinitely. The result: