When the champagne has been on ice for nigh on a century, the corks pop all the louder. So it was last month, when physicists at the Advanced LIGO experiment announced the detection of a gravitational wave passing through Earth. That was indeed a triumph - but what aboutthe ones that got away? Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of the universe created when massive bodies move and accelerate in each other's gravitational fields. Advanced LIGO's catch apparently emanated from two black holes, each around 30 times the mass of our sun, falling into each other's arms 1.3 billion light years away. But mergers of bigger black holes, such as the supermassive ones thought to form the centres of mature galaxies (see page 33), will emit gravitational waves with much longer wavelengths, "LIGO wi 11 not be sensitive to them," says astronomer Avi Loeb of Harvard University. "We need different observatories."
展开▼
机译：当香槟已经在冰上放置近一个世纪时，软木塞发出的声音更大。上个月，高级LIGO实验的物理学家宣布检测到穿过地球的重力波。那确实是一次胜利-但是那些逃脱的人呢？引力波是当大质量物体在彼此的引力场中移动并加速时在宇宙结构中形成的涟漪。先进的LIGO的捕获物显然来自两个黑洞，每个黑洞的质量约为我们太阳质量的30倍，落入彼此的怀抱中13亿光年。但是更大的黑洞的合并，例如被认为形成成熟星系中心的超大质量黑洞（请参见第33页），将发出波长更长的引力波，“ LIGO wi 11对它们不敏感，”天文学家Avi Loeb说。哈佛大学。 “我们需要不同的观测站。”
展开▼
