It is not every day we get the opportunity to listen to the sound of gravity and trust us it is worth listening to. Awesome sounds generated roughly 1 Billion years ago in a galaxy far far away, when two blach holes collided.
Seriously considering incorporating these sounds into a tribute song, stay tuned and it may become real.
Einstein’s 1915 theory of general relativity predicted that gravitational waves are created in spacetime as a byproduct of objects moving about the universe, which dictates where they travel and the impact each has on the other. And today, a group of researchers from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory Scientific Collaboration (LIGO) might have just actually proved it to be true.
Using two ultra-sensitive activity detectors in Washington and Louisiana that are about 2.5 miles (4 km) in length, LIGO was able find the smallest needle in the largest haystack: gravitational waves recorded from the merger of two massive black holes that happened over 1 billion years ago.
Inspired by the first direct detection of gravitational waves by LIGO, this simulation video below plays in slow motion but would take about one third of a second if run in real time. Set on a cosmic stage the black holes are posed in front of stars, gas, and dust. Their extreme gravity lenses the light from behind them into Einstein rings as they spiral closer and finally merge into one. The otherwise invisible gravitational waves generated as the massive objects rapidly coalesce cause the visible image to ripple and slosh both inside and outside the Einstein rings even after the black holes have merged. Dubbed GW150914, the gravitational waves detected by LIGO are consistent with the merger of 36 and 29 solar mass black holes at a distance of 1.3 billion light-years. The final, single black hole has 62 times the mass of the Sun, with the remaining 3 solar masses converted into energy in gravitational waves.