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LIGO detects most massive black hole merger to date

(www.caltech.edu)
360 points Eduard | 1 comments | 14 Jul 25 20:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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WrongOnInternet ◴[14 Jul 25 21:27 UTC] No.44565549[source]▶
> the 225-solar-mass black hole was created by the coalescence of black holes each approximately 100 and 140 times the mass of the Sun.

Does this mean that 15 solar masses were converted into energy? Because that's a LOT of energy.

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andrepd ◴[14 Jul 25 21:32 UTC] No.44565596[source]▶
Yes! And still, gravity is so weak that that immense amount of energy translates to just a relative contraction of less than 10^-20, or about a hair's width in the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
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cgdl ◴[14 Jul 25 21:37 UTC] No.44565649[source]▶
Do we know how far this event was from earth? Wouldn't that distance be the determiner of what the relative contraction observed on earth would be?
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sgustard ◴[14 Jul 25 21:54 UTC] No.44565766[source]▶
estimated distance of 2.2 Gpc per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW231123
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1. BurningFrog ◴[15 Jul 25 06:06 UTC] No.44568282[source]▶
That's 7.2 billion light years. More than halfway to the most distant galaxy the Webb telescope has found.

So this event happened 7.2 billion years ago.

There is no mention of in which direction. Maybe the triangulation wasn't working at the time. You need three LIGOs for that.