Gravitational waves offer glimpse into the past – but will we ever catch ripples from the Big Bang?
Thursday, February 18, 2016 - 09:31
in Astronomy & Space
Einstein was right – changes in gravity do spread as waves through space. The LIGO experiment detected such waves from a collision between two black holes with masses of about 36 and 29 times that of the sun (described as 36 and 29 "solar masses"). But the merger of these 65 solar masses in total created a remnant of just 62 – so what happened to the other three? These were used to power the burst of gravitational waves, in a spectacular demonstration of Einstein's famous formula, E=Mc2, where mass and energy are equivalent.