The numbers here are just staggering: - Black hole merger occurred 3 billion light years away - Two solar masses were converted to energy - Briefly 10^34 megatons of energy were released every second This is hard to intuitively wrap your head around because we think of space as constant. Something like this can distort space itself. Amazing stuff.
Anyone familiar enough in this area that can help me answer these questions: -gravitational waves also propogate at c so how did they escape the event horizons from which they originated? -what and where was/is the "more energy than all stars emit as light in the universe"--10^34 megatons--released from? From matter in the accretion disk orbiting the black holes? -the article says these two were spinning non-uniforml…
2. Imagine you have two serious dents in some stiff plastic sheet. By tapping on the plastic with a hammer, you can't get rid of them, but you can sort of move the dents around. Now imagine that you maneuver the dents towards each other, so they merge into one bigger dent, and as that happens the sheet makes a dull thumping sound as the rigid material snaps into a radically different shape. That's a little like what happened here.
3. Yes, black holes maintain the spin they had before they became black holes (and in fact their angular momentum is vastly increased in the process, just like any spinning thing that reduces its radius).
