Black hole smashup generated yottawatts of power
36 septillion yottawatts were released during collision
VIOLENT OUTBURST At the moment two black holes merge, space and time get whipped up into a frenzy that generates more power than 100 thousand billion billion suns. The colors show how time slows near the black holes. Where color is red, time moves slower.
SXS
Yottawatt \YOT-ah-wat\ n.:
1 million billion billion watts
That’s a lotta watts. And a lot more — 3.6 x 1049 watts, or 36 septillion yottawatts — blasted out of the black hole collision that the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory detected in September. Rather than a flash of light, the power came out as ripples in spacetime. As the black holes merged, three suns’ worth of mass transformed into gravitational wave energy in a few milliseconds, researchers report in Physical Review Letters on February 12.
“[It] created a violent storm in the fabric of space and time,” Caltech astrophysicist Kip Thorne said at a February news conference announcing the discovery. The storm’s power, he said, “was 50 times greater than all of the power put out by all of the stars in the universe put together.”
B.P. Abbott et al. Observation of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger. Physical Review Letters. Vol. 116, February 12, 2016, p. 061102. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102.
C. Crockett. Black hole heavyweights triggered gravity wave event. Science News Online, February 17, 2016.
A. Grant. Gravity waves from black holes verify Einstein’s prediction. Science News Online, February 11, 2016.
C. Crockett. Gravitational waves explained. Science News Online, February 11, 2016.
M. Bartusiak. The long road to detecting gravity waves. Science News Online, February 11, 2016.
