Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Nautilus

    Are Gravitational Wave Detections Becoming Normal?

    by Dan Garisto Sep 27, 2017 3 minutes
    One day, detecting phenomenal cosmic events through gravitational waves will not make the news.

    When I heard the news, I emailed my editor with my immediate reaction: “Bummer.”

    For the fourth time now, humans have directly detected the collision of two black holes. The violent merger occurred over 2 billion years ago, between black holes with 25 and 31 times the mass of our sun. It released an energy equivalent to three times the mass of our sun (recall) in the form of ripples in spacetime. After traveling about 2 billion light-years to the Earth, these ripples were nearly imperceptible, distorting space by about one-thousandth the diameter of a proton. 

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from Nautilus

    Nautilus3 min read
    Making Light of Gravity
    1 Gravity is fun! The word gravity, derived by Newton from the Latin gravitas, conveys both weight and deadly seriousness. But gravity can be the opposite of that. As I researched my book during the sleep-deprived days of the pandemic, flashbacks to
    Nautilus5 min read
    The Bad Trip Detective
    Jules Evans was 17 years old when he had his first unpleasant run-in with psychedelic drugs. Caught up in the heady rave culture that gripped ’90s London, he took some acid at a club one night and followed a herd of unknown faces to an afterparty. Th
    Nautilus10 min read
    The Ocean Apocalypse Is Upon Us, Maybe
    From our small, terrestrial vantage points, we sometimes struggle to imagine the ocean’s impact on our lives. We often think of the ocean as a flat expanse of blue, with currents as orderly, if sinuous, lines. In reality, it is vaster and more chaoti

    Related Books & Audiobooks