“Did you feel that? What was it?”

Scientists think they might have explained the origin of a bizarre ripple in spacetime that swept through Earth on May 21, 2019, and has defied easy explanation ever since.

This disturbance in the very fabric of the universe, known as a gravitational wave, may have been produced by a type of cataclysmic merger between black holes that has never been seen before, potentially shedding light on the mysterious dynamics between these exotic objects, reports a new study.

Gravitational waves are generated by extreme cosmic phenomena, such as collisions between black holes or the explosive deaths of massive stars. Since 2015, scientists have been able to capture these incredibly subtle waves using sophisticated detectors, a breakthrough that has opened an entirely new window into the universe.

…The two black holes that merged to make this wave were both several dozen times the mass of the Sun, making this the biggest black hole union ever detected.

However, the short duration and unusual signature of the wave have sparked debate about the masses, spins, and orbits of the two black holes that sent these ripples into space. In other words, it’s not exactly clear just what kind of a merger it would take to make these weird waves.

I’ve been a science and sci-fi geek all my reading life. This is the stuff of dreams…and it’s reality we’re looking at. Even if it’s still early days when it comes to understanding the processes concerned.

3 thoughts on ““Did you feel that? What was it?”

  1. Theremin music says:

    Physicists have worked out how to determine whether a black hole is actually a wormhole that could theoretically be traveled through https://physics.aps.org/articles/v15/s154
    Physicists have long toyed with the idea that black holes could be leading to “white holes,” or wells that spew out streams of particles and radiation.
    These two ends could together form a wormhole, or an Einstein-Rosen bridge to be specific, which some physicists believe could stretch any amount of time and space, a tantalizing theory that could rewrite the laws of spacetime as we understand them today.
    Now, the researchers suggest that the “throat” of a wormhole could look very similar to previously discovered black holes, like the monster Sagittarius A* which is believed to be lurking at the center of our galaxy.
    However Many scientists postulate that wormholes are merely projections of a fourth spatial dimension, analogous to how a two-dimensional (2D) being could experience only part of a three-dimensional (3D) object.

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