1. 34
    LIGO detects gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes ☶ science journals.aps.org
    ngoldbaum avatar via ngoldbaum 2 years ago | cached | 3 comments

See also this summary of the paper from the astrobites blog: http://astrobites.org/2016/02/11/opening-our-ears-to-the-universe-ligo-observes-gravitational-waves/

Since the PRL site is getting hammered, here’s an alternate link to the paper: https://dcc.ligo.org/public/0122/P150914/014/LIGO-P150914%3ADetection_of_GW150914.pdf

And a page which links to all of the supplementary papers: https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-P150914/public

  1.  

  2. 5
    voronoipotato avatar voronoipotato 2 years ago | link

    Did you guys feel it?

    :P

    1. 5
      ngoldbaum avatar ngoldbaum edited 2 years ago | link

      So the signal was a “strain” of 10^-21. Strain is the size of the deflection divided by the size of the interferometer’s arm, and given that the LIGO interferometer is ~4 km, this corresponds to a deflection of ~10^-18 m, or about 10^-8 times the size of a hydrogen atom. So no, no one felt it :)

      1. 2
        voronoipotato avatar voronoipotato 2 years ago | link

        wow don’t invalidate my feelings