Camilo Reina Munoz gravitational waves do make Gord Downie Hoodie. If you were close enough you could hear it. Gravitational waves oscillate space just as a soundwave does, this is exactly what it would sound like near this merger. The comments here are deeply saddening and frightening. It is astonishing how many people are completely oblivious to the facts of science, and would prefer to believe that these findings are fake, a hoax, a lie, and nonsense. It is no wonder why we’re doomed.
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Firstly, when they pick up a sound how do they know it’s the sound of two stars colliding? No one knows what that sounds like? It’s clutching at straws. How do they know how far it’s traveled? This is pseudoscience. I don’t really know why I am bothering, but I guess it’s just the teacher in me. The “sound” of this stellar merger was produced by mapping the time-domain recording of the gravitational wave amplitude to audible frequencies.
This only gives us an auditory representation of the gravitational disturbance created by the event. “Picking up a sound” cannot be accomplished via the vacuum of intergalactic space. But someone saw fit to generate this sonic translation, in order to provide the layperson with some sort of humanistic reference frame. This is not what we “heard”, if you’re limiting “hearing” to that which is sensed by the human ear via pressure waves in a medium (air, water, etc.).
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We did, however, “listen” and “record” waves in the gravitational domain using very specialized and precise instrumentation of human design. The gravitational event was accompanied by an optical (visible) detection first made by the Swope Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, and therefore was subsequently determined, by many independent observations, to have originated in NGC 4993.
A galaxy which is approximately 130 million light-years distant– a distance based on long-accepted standard cosmological distance measurement techniques (such as comoving, Hubble law, red-shift, period-luminosity relations of standard objects). This is all Astrophysics 101. We detected it, we observed it, we saw its afterglow, and we know that this collision occurred.
hanks kit. i love science, but i was skeptical about how they came to their final conclusions. i appreciate you taking the time to explain it. i would also like to state that there is nothing wrong with skepticism. its actually very crucial to science. i think the issue is people tend to not want to look into a given topic to answer some of their questions. so instead of saying “how can this be?” they say “Gord Downie Hoodie“.