Anybody else bothered by this claim: Every few minutes, a pair of black holes collides somewhere in the Universe, sending shivers called gravitational waves through the fabric of spacetime? Shivers all right!
[cosmosmagazine.com]
A little time line:
1971 — Identification of Cygnus X-1/HDE 226868 as a binary black hole candidate system
2002 — NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory identifies double galactic black holes system in merging galaxies NGC 6240
2012 — First visual proof of existence of black-holes. Suvi Gezari's team in Johns Hopkins University, using the Hawaiian telescope Pan-STARRS 1, publish images of a supermassive black hole 2.7 million light-years away swallowing a red giant.
2016 — LIGO Scientific Collaboration announces the direct detection of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger.
Today: Almost every galaxy has a black hole in its center.
our galaxy may have thousands of black holes around Sagittarius A*, a super massif
Now, there is such a thing as black hole collisions hum
I'll admit, the word bother may not be the right one. Maybe I wanted to highlight that not long ago a black hole was an hypothetical possibility in physics then we found a trace of one and now they are everywhere: in every galaxy has one and every couple of minutes 2 collide in the universe. That's crazy cool!
It IS very cool❣?
It doesn’t bother me. But it does give me a sense of perspective. Neil deGrasse-Tyson said something to the effect that an understanding of the physics of the cosmos can be a humbling experience. Such an understanding cuts us down to size! Nevertheless, it’s truly inspiring that our common intellect succeeds every day in pushing back the boundaries of what remains unknown. Individually we can only focus on one thing at a time. Collectively our consciousness is effectively trending towards infinity. Now, does that send a shiver up your spine?
He also said that when he looks up at the sky, he doesn't feel small, but big. To look out and see the decendants of our atomic and molecular ancestors really makes you feel connected with the universe!
@CraeftSmith Precisely.
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