The sound of two black holes merging
Turn up the sound and listen to the signal, slowed down and then at its real speed.
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What just happened (read it after the experiment)
Two black holes, 36 and 29 times the mass of the Sun, circled each other faster and faster, then merged. The event made space itself vibrate, and the vibration traveled for 1.3 billion years before it reached us.
The LIGO detectors picked it up on September 14, 2015. Turned into sound, the signal rises in a few tenths of a second, then stops dead: physicists call it the “chirp.”
For the first time, humanity wasn’t looking at the universe: it was listening to it.
More experiments
Sources
- LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration, “Observation of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger,” Physical Review Letters, 2016.