When you fall into a black hole, everything that falls in after you over millions of years, as seen by you inside the black hole, comes pounding down on you in a fraction of a second, because of the enormous differences of time flow.
Black holes can bang against space-time as mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song.
In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves the planets and the stars is the distortion of space and time.
Time slowed and reality bent; on and on the eggman went.
This is the first real evidence that we've seen now of high gravitational field strengths: monstrous things like stars moving at the velocity of light, smashing into each other, and making the geometry of space-time turn into some sort of washing machine.
A black hole really is an object with very rich structure, just like Earth has a rich structure of mountains, valleys, oceans, and so forth. Its warped space whirls around the central singularity like air in a tornado.
A gravitational wave is a very slight stretching in one dimension. If there's a gravitational wave traveling towards you, you get a stretch in the dimension that's perpendicular to the direction it's moving. And then perpendicular to that first stretch, you have a compression along the other dimension.
The waves travel with the velocity of light and slightly squeeze and stretch space transverse to the direction of their motion. The first waves we measured came from the collision of two black holes each about 30 times the mass of our sun.
On the other hand, we don't understand the theory too completely, and because of this fuzziness of spacetime, the very concept of spacetime and spacetime dimensions isn't precisely defined.
When you're falling through space time has no meaning.
Every time you accelerate - say by jumping up and down - you're generating gravitational waves.
Time can behave like another direction in space under extreme conditions.
The size of the effect that we measured from the first event, the merging of two black holes, the actual size of the signal was about one thousandth the size of a proton, what it did to our apparatus.
The waves are subtle, altering spacetime and the distance between objects as far apart as the Earth and the Moon by much less than the width of an atom. As such, gravitational radiation has not been directly detected yet. We hope to change that soon.
We know about black holes and neutron stars, but we hope there are other phenomena we can see because of the gravitational waves they emit.
There was, like, this black hole where the world used to be, and we were both falling toward it. What could we hold on to?
A warp," Nita whispered. "A tunnel through space-time. Are you a white hole?" It stopped bobbing, stared at her as if she had said something derogatory. (Do I look like a hole?)
