Physicists Detect Gravitational Waves, Proving Einstein Right

I remember learning about the LIGO experiment back when it was being built, a decade ago, and at the time it seemed so amazing: a giant tube of vacuum, sealed underground and so sensitive that it could detect animals walking nearby, listening to the moving and twisting of space itself… I guess we're finally seeing that with immense human ingenuity and the most careful of engineering, the universe will offer its secrets up to us.

This also means that between LIGO and ATLAS/CMS, the last few years have screwed in the final screws on two of the big physics advances of the 20th century: quantum field theory and general relativity are now both experimentally complete, and both look nearly unassailed in their correctness. The next steps for physics look increasingly abstruse: understanding the exceptional cases, like black holes, holography, and the fundamentally computational form of the universe. It's an exciting time, and it looks more and more like we're close to the very bottom, since we have to look so far now to find anything outside our models.

> And then the ringing stopped as the two holes coalesced into a single black hole, a trapdoor in space with the equivalent mass of 62 suns. All in a fifth of a second, Earth time.

Am I reading this correctly, that shortly after the detector came online we just happened to observe the exact moment a billion years ago that two black holes collided?

Was that extremely coincidental? Or do these events happen all the time, and so if it wasn't those two black holes it would be two others?

To be fair, that article is pre-announcement and doesn't have much detail on the actual discovery.

Actual paper here: http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116...

> Was that extremely coincidental? Or do these events happen all the time, and so if it wasn't those two black holes it would be two others?

From the article, no one knows: "Black holes, the even-more-extreme remains of dead stars, could be expected to do the same, but nobody knew if they existed in pairs or how often they might collide. If they did, however, the waves from the collision would be far louder and lower pitched than those from neutron stars."

The predictions for the LIGO detection rate are very poor. They're based on a sample of just a handful of binary pulsars observed in our Galaxy, which would produce NS-NS mergers. The BH-BH merger rate is almost totally unconstrained, although it is generally thought to be less than the NS-NS merger rate. So the fact that a BH-BH merger was the first detection, and the fact that it was detected so soon after the sensitivity increases is evidence that the BH-BH merger rate is probably somewhat higher than expected. But we won't know for sure until LIGO detects more events and the rate can be better constrained. Sometimes you do just get lucky.

I should add that there are lots of selection biases and educated guesses in all of this, too. The signal from BH-BH mergers is louder and easier to detect from larger distances. At the same time, NSs are probably more common than BHs, but it's not really clear whether there are more NS-NS binaries than BH-BH binaries because NSs receive kicks from the supernova when they are born but BHs (probably) do not. This may have the effect of blowing apart many nascent NS-NS binaries but leaving the BH-BH binaries intact.