Hearing a black hole's song may be the key to understanding cosmic events

The Music of Black Holes NASA/JPL-CalTech

Syracuse University physicists hope that a new supercomputer will help them pick out the sound of a black hole from the cosmic symphony. The computer will process data gathered by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, which is designed to listen for the ripples in space-time known as gravity waves.

Since those waves are thought to be the product of violent cosmic events such as the collision of black holes, the Syracuse scientists intend to do a bit of cosmological sleuthing, and parse the received data for hints of a black hole's song. This job will require some serious processing power: The new supercomputer, SUGAR, boasts 640 gigabytes of random access memory and 96 terabytes of storage space. So, no, you can't do this project at home.

2 Comments

It would be cool to here what a blackhole sounds like, but how could this info. help us understand them?

Hmmm. How do you measure the Frequencies of a gravity waves if they travel through "space time". In other words, how do you measure a wave coming through a function of a fourth demension when the observer is in a third demension?? Especially when these ripples are light years away!! For all we know "given that time is a constant", these ripples we inact with are really just super-sonic effects of gravity traveling faster then the speeds of light....Almost like refractions of light bursting in all directions due to the time dilation you encounter in space. Maybe we only see the effects of time being only another kind of space. And these "gravity waves/ripples in time" are like sonic booms of sound yet a function of space "time" and how when gravity breaks the speed of light, it is for that breif instant (lost in space) and alls we inact is the left overs of the leak into another deminsion.


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