Tuesday, June 12, 2018
Gravitational Waves
A newly completed this commission for IX Arts, which will be on display at the IX show in October. The allegorical image of merging black holes is a poetic representation of recently observed waves of gravity.
Since our ancestors first looked up at the stars, everything we've observed of the universe has come in the form of light: electromagnetic waves. In the last century we've learned everything we know from looking at every part of the electromagnetic spectrum and analyzing that light. For the first time in 2015, humans observed energy arriving at earth of a different sort than electromagnetic light.
1.4 billion years ago, two black holes spiraled around each other and merged, releasing three solar masses of energy in the form of gravitational waves, literal stretching and squashing of space. If you had been nearby the waves could have squeezed you to spaghetti, but when they spread out and passed through earth in 2015 we detected those waves, dissipated to less than the width of an atomic nucleus. Our whole lives, these waves have periodically passed right through us, unnoticed, but now humanity has gained the eyes to see them.
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