GRAVITATIONAL WAVES. I began this blog on November 20, 2006 with this post on the evidence of the Big Bang in the night sky. On February 14, 2016, I posted here on the discovery and measurement of a gravitational wave (“a ripple in the fabric of space and time”). That measurement was described as: “equal to measuring the distance from Earth to the nearest star outside the solar system to within the width of a hair”.
Lee Billings on October 16, 2017 made this post on the Scientific American website about the discovery and measurement of a gravitational wave which resulted from the collision of two neutron stars. The gravitational wave showed up on multiple telescopes around the world in the form of “a bright blue dot embedded in a giant elliptical galaxy, a 10-billion-year-old swarm of old, red stars about 120 million light-years away…. A side-by-side comparison with earlier images of that same galaxy showed no such dot; it was something new and recent.”
I love that description in the second paragraph. The colors make it so much more vivid in my mind’s eye.
Also as I read it I consistently saw it as “gravitational waves” as “gestational waves” for some reason.