Gravitational Waves

An incredibly big, interesting discovery was announced this week that has some eye opening implications.  Gravitational waves were detected from the collision of two rather large black holes in space.

It begs lots of questions - How do see black holes as they're well...black holes that light doesn't escape from.  And why are we all excited about finding waves in space..?  

You actually "see" black holes by the mess they create - and measure this by the warping and waves created - both visible and up until now invisible. 

A black hole's "edge" or event horizon sucks in matter and energy.  Nothing is supposed to escape, or at least nothing we have been able to perceive until now. (Small side note that there have been observations of energy streams coming out of black holes recorded, these are not confirmed or explained or understood).  The tremendous force and effect on energy causes surrounding areas to shear.  A little like when the tub drains and makes that sucking noise.  We can observe in various wavelengths that shearing, and infer the presence of a black hole.  So that's how they are seen and tracked and that's how we know what was creating these waves in space.  Black holes were hypothesized by Einstein, and while not yet conclusively proven, thee is general consensus now that they do exist. 

The gravitational wave that should be there (think of a big shark rushing to the beach under the water and while invisible, you can tell from the disturbance in the water surface that something big is there) were also predicted by Einstein and reflect a natural phenomena (gravity) that isn't itself sucked into the black hole. It's an attribute of all matter (visible and dark) in space / time.

The fact that sensitive enough equipment can see these ripples now is stunning not because of the black holes themselves, but for what else we may be able to "see" via gravitational waves.   It's like figuring out how to hear for the first time and hearing a screaming baby.  A big obvious thing we could already perceive via radio telescopes and a visual effect referred to as gravitational lensing.

The value of being able to detect gravitational waves will be to 'hear' what we can't today - the crickets and mice - specifically to stitch together an audio (or in this case) a gravity landscape.  There is so much hypothesis about various "dark" elements that we could not perceive and gravitational waves open an almost literal new dimension for us.  

This is an exciting opening that much future science knowledge will flow through.