It's pretty wild to me that they can extrapolate things like the square area of a black hole by watching something so incredibly "subtle" (to us humans) as gravitational waves.
"There's a very famous statement in physics that Stephen Hawking worked out, which is that the area, the surface area, of black holes can never decrease," explains Maximiliano Isi, an astrophysicist with Columbia University and the Flatiron Institute.
a new analysis showing that between the two of them, the initial black holes had a combined surface area of 240,000 square kilometers (roughly the size of Oregon). After they merged to form a single black hole, its area was about 400,000 square kilometers (roughly the size of California).
Hawking's theory says that the final area of the black hole has to be bigger than the sum of the two initial areas, says Chatziioannou, "and this is what we demonstrated observationally with that signal."
It's pretty wild to me that they can extrapolate things like the square area of a black hole by watching something so incredibly "subtle" (to us humans) as gravitational waves.
It's pretty wild to me that they can extrapolate things like the square area of a black hole by watching something so incredibly "subtle" (to us humans) as gravitational waves.