The Mystery of How Black Holes Collide and Merge Is Beginning to Unravel
By Nancy Atkinson, Seeker | April 8, 2017 07:19am ET
Last year, scientists announced that they had finally observed gravitational waves, the elusive and long sought-after ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were first posited by Albert Einstein. The waves came from a catastrophic event — the collision of two black holes located about 1.3 billion light years away from Earth — and the released energy undulated across the universe, much like ripples in a pond.
The detection by the upgraded Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Advanced LIGO), along with two subsequent gravitational wave discoveries, confirmed a major prediction of Einstein’s 1915 general theory of relativity and heralded a new era in physics, allowing scientists to study the universe in a new way by using gravity instead of light.
http://www.livescience.com/58609-the-mystery-of-how-black-holes-collide-and-merge-is-beginning-to-unravel.html
