After being offline for much of 2016 undergoing upgrades, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has made its third observation of the ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves. On January 4, 2017 at 10:11:58.6 UTC, LIGO detected the merger of two immense black holes over 3 billion light-years away from the Earth. The resulting black hole has a mass about 49 times that of our sun and during the final moments released more energy in the form of gravitational waves than all the stars in the observable universe.
This simulation from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics shows the binary black-hole coalescence detected by LIGO. The waveform at the bottom depicts the gravitational wave, which starts with a frequency of about 25Hz. As the black holes spiral closer and closer together, the frequency and amplitude of the gravitational waves increase until the merger occurs and ends the perturbation in spacetime.
Source: https://goo.gl/5oqnJn
LIGO’s first discovery: https://goo.gl/XBCPbe
How LIGO works: https://goo.gl/NDO7VX
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