So when two black holes collide, they apparently make a “ploip!” sound.
i mean, what they actually do is make a cataclysmic deformity in the shape of space itself, and you want to be nowhere near it. In the collision announced today, two black holes lost like 3 suns’ worth of their mass, and used that mass up as energy, twisting and bending the space around them. Luckily it happened in some other galaxy.
But then, this disturbance spread out through space as a gravitational wave. The LIGO scientists basically recorded that wave, and (just for the heck of it, as far as I can see) converted it into a sound wave.
By some sheer fluke the sound that is thus produced is already in the range of human hearing. It doesn’t last long enough for you to make anything out - but if you then slow it down a bit, the sound it makes is “ploip!”
It’s actually adorable.
The speaker on the above clip is Gabriela González, LIGO Scientific Collaboration spokesperson and professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University
