Did a Starry 'Mosh Pit' Spawn LIGOs Gravitational Waves? (Kavli Roundtable)
By Adam Hadhazy, The Kavli Foundation | June 2, 2017 12:00pm ET
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n 2015, after a century of speculation, the world finally detected the elusive ripples in the universes fabric known as gravitational waves. This happened when a wave-hunting experiment called LIGO, which acts like a colossal tuning fork, sensed these waves hurled out from the cataclysmic collision of two massive black holes. (Read more: What is LIGO?)
But where are these collisions occurring? A new paper about LIGO's third gravitational-wave detection, announced June 1, suggests that the black hole smashup might well have been inside of a beautiful object called a globular cluster a glittering celestial "snow globe" filled with hundreds of thousands of closely packed stars. At their centers, globular clusters are believed to harbor dozens to hundreds of black holes by far the greatest concentration of these exotic objects found anywhere in the universe. [Hunting Gravitational Waves: The LIGO Laser Interferometer Project in Photos]
Globular clusters could very well be a major source of the gravitational waves scientists are sensing with LIGO. Studying these waves could teach us more about their dense, star cluster origins, and in the process also shed light on the construction of galaxies, the universe's biggest groupings of stars.
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