Kind: captions
Language: en
I've come to Caltech because there is a
brand new gravitational wave Discovery
let's go find out what it
is uh can we talk about the the
discovery R yeah can I I want to sit on
one of my black holes all right if you
notice uh this one's big one and that
one's a little one this one is a little
one yeah I I always feel like I'm I'm
the most excited out of everybody really
yeah I'm because I'm excited when
nothing's happening cleaning some dust
off a piece of glass and it still seems
exciting I think this is the key piece
of glass in our system and just clean
dust off of it how cool is that on
January 4th just like a few hours after
midnight boom we got another signal much
like the first signal we found in
September of
2015 and uh it's also well represented
by these black holes that we're sitting
on one of the
black holes had a mass of about 30 solar
masses and the other one was about uh 20
and this one lasted longer than the
first one uh both because our detectors
are better at the lowest
frequencies and uh because the signal is
from black holes which are smaller so
they last longer and it's really
dramatic if you listen to the audio the
first signal that we got it's only
Audible for about a tenth of a second it
just boom like this but this new one
sounds like boom but it's a little bit
more drawn out and it comes from farther
away it's the furthest black hole merger
that we've been able to detect so it's
about three billion Lighty years away
which means that signal the merger
actually happened three billion years
ago and the signal has been propagating
to us for 3 billion years what's
particularly interesting in this merger
are hints that the two black holes
weren't spinning with the same
orientation as each other or as their
orbit this suggests that rather than
forming out of binary Stars they formed
separately and later became entwined
through orbital Dynamics this one really
says okay we now know that we're going
to be seeing a lot of these things it's
a it's a relief to have another signal
to know that um the universe is not just
populated by all tiny tiny black holes
or by no black holes if we improve our
detector sensitivity by say a factor of
two or three the rates will go up from
you know seeing one every month or every
two months to seeing one every day or
every week I would say it's very
surprising now that uh our first three
signals came from binary black hole
mergers which were pretty much a
unexpected source as of mid 2015 there's
a working Theory it's kind of exotic
that says that some of the black holes
we're seeing are primordial all right
they weren't formed through you know
conventional Supernova explosions they
were formed during the big bag
themselves and they could be a a part of
Dark Matter component of dark matter
matter all right so we may actually
determine after we get statistics on
lots and lots and lots of these you know
black hole mergers that we're actually
seeing maybe a hint of dark matter it's
sort of scratching at the door of the
biggest mysteries that we have today in
cosmology in the past before there were
any signals people used to use this
phrase which I completely disagree with
and they would say uh you know if we
don't find any signals it will be even
more interesting than if we do I said no
no no no no
no no no no lots of signals that's what
we want but now that we have a few I'm
feeling a little bit more complacent and
so I'd say uh we really expected to see
a lot of binary neutron stars and if we
don't well isn't that interesting it
means there's something going on you
know you have all the pieces we heard of
know how neutron stars work we've seen
neutron stars uh using radio astronomy
we know they're out there we know that
they come together in binaries but why
don't we see their gravitational waves
so it could be something else happens to
them uh just before the final merger and
there's something in their evolutionary
track which goes off in a different
direction than what we expect and I
think that would actually be interesting
I guess I've become one of those people
that said uh if you don't see it then
maybe it's interesting because we'll
learn something you never know how many
more signals we have sitting in the can
that we're not telling you
about can you say that
again I don't think so would you would
you give me the exclusive
I would you know Derek come on if I had
secret signals you'd be the first to
[Music]
know these lights are the first two
tentacles of a jellyfish I'm building
and there's a neural network which then
drives this little chip which modulates
these lights and it's going to use these
sensors like the proximity and the sound
to figure out if people are close to it
and the neural network is going to train
itself to flash the tentacle lights to
make people come closer to it