Conceptual design of the Fermilab holometer (Fermilab) During the hunt for the predicted ripples in space-time — known as gravitational waves — physicists stumbled across a rather puzzling phenomenon. Last year, I reported about the findings of scientists using the GEO600 experiment in Germany....

Forget building gravitational wave detectors costing hundreds of millions of dollars (I’m looking at you, LIGO), make use of the most accurate cosmic timekeepers instead and save a bundle. The North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) is a proposal that involves...

The event horizon of a black hole is the point of no return. If anything, even light, strays within the bounds of this gravitational trap, it will never escape. The event horizon is what makes a black hole black. But say if there was a way to remove the event horizon, leaving just the black hole’s...

Gravitational waves generated by a binary system (MIT) The hunt for gravitational waves continue, but unfortunately all gravitational wave hunters around the world are churning up nothing. Just noise. Could it be that this consequence of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity is horribly flawed?...

I’ve received this question so many times, so I thought I’d post, for reference purposes, the difference between a gravitational wave and a gravity wave. Yes, they are different creatures (although many authors would have you believe otherwise). Gravitational waves are theoretical perturbations...

Luke and Obi-Wan look at a 3D hologram of Leia projected by R2D2 (Star Wars) Could our cosmos be a projection from the edge of the observable Universe? Sounds like a silly question, but scientists are seriously taking on this idea. As it happens, a gravitational wave detector in Germany is turning up...

Theoretical gravitational waves generated after a black hole collision. Can we surf them? Gravitational waves are a theoretical consequence of a propagating energy disturbance through space-time. They are predicted by Einstein’s general relativity equations, and astrophysicists are going to great...

Black holes cannot be naked... the event horizon will always be there to cover them up... You can manipulate a black hole as much as you like but you’ll never get rid of its event horizon, a new study suggests. This may sound a little odd, the event horizon is what makes the black hole, well…...

Northern leg of the LIGO facility on the Hanford Reservation (LIGO) Six years and nearly 400 million dollars later, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) still hasn’t turned up the evidence for gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are predicted by fundamental Einstein...

Astrophysicists love to simulate huge collisions, and they don’t get much bigger than this. From the discoverers of the first ever observed black hole collision back in April, new observational characteristics have been researched and Max Planck astrophysicists believe that after two supermassive...