LIGO

The most famous such system is the Hulse-Taylor binary pulsar, where pulsar observations have confirmed the existence of gravitational wave energy loss to remarkable precision.

The detection of gravitational waves by the LIGO observatory from merging neutron stars and black holes has opened a new window on binary evolution, allowing astronomers to observe the final violent moments of stellar theft.

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The final moments before merger are among the most energetic events in the cosmos, with gravitational wave power rivaling the power output of all visible stars in all visible galaxies combined.

The collision itself produces X-rays and gamma rays, as well as gravitational waves, creating a multi-messenger event that astronomers can observe across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

The neutron star merger events detected by LIGO have confirmed theoretical predictions about the creation of heavy elements like gold and platinum, showing that binary star theft and mergers are the furnaces that forge the rarest elements in the periodic table.

Each detected event carries information about the internal structure of neutron stars, the strength of gravity in the strongest fields, and the universe's expansion history, making binary mergers the most informative events in modern astronomy.

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So Jana, your book, The Black Hole Blues, it explored LIGO, just the quest, not so much LIGO, but the quest to measure gravity waves and what effort that would take.

So could you describe to me what's going on when two black holes collide? and how they're gonna give us a gravity wave.

Why don't they give us gravity waves all the time?

So it's like mallets on a drum.

When they get closer and closer, they're getting louder and louder, and it's like this crescendo.

So when LIGO made its first detection, it was the last one fifth of a second of the orbits of two black holes, each one about 30 times the mass of the sun, a couple hundred kilometers across.

They're going very nearly the speed of light, and they're executing a few orbits in the final one fifth of a second, and boom, it's finally loud enough.

And so like, do they really exist? Is this just theorist fantasy, or do black holes actually exist? And the answer, science can't prove things like that definitively, especially with astronomical objects, but over the last few decades, the evidence has been growing and growing, and I'd say it's almost incontrovertible now that black holes really do exist.

And what's particularly exciting in the last few years, as Andy mentioned, is four years ago LIGO started observing gravitational waves from black hole collisions.

And this is now a whole new level of direct evidence that tells us black holes exist.

So I'll explain a little bit about gravitational waves, and then I'll show you what aspects of the signals, or why do we say that the signals that LIGO has shown us actually is coming from the collisions of black holes? What is this evidence that these very strange and fascinating objects actually exist, as described by Einstein's theory of general relativity? Okay, so let's sort of begin with Newton's theory of gravity, which is now well over 300 years old.

In 1687, Newton came up with his universal law of gravitation, sort of consistent with his Newtonian mechanics framework, where gravity was one of the forces that could exist in nature.

And it's a very particular force, and he came up with a very elegant description for this, the so-called universal law of gravitation.

And there really are no convincing ones.

So that's perhaps a decent argument for it being black holes, but in some sense, they're such extraordinary objects, paraphrasing Carl Sagan, we need extraordinary evidence to say that we're really getting black holes as predicted by relativity.