{"id":26926,"date":"2016-06-15T20:47:40","date_gmt":"2016-06-16T03:47:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/06\/did-gravitational-wave-detector-find-dark-matter"},"modified":"2017-06-04T19:56:03","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T02:56:03","slug":"did-gravitational-wave-detector-find-dark-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/06\/did-gravitational-wave-detector-find-dark-matter","title":{"rendered":"Did gravitational wave detector find dark matter?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/did-gravitational-wave-detector-find-dark-matter.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When an astronomical observatory detected two black holes colliding in deep space, scientists celebrated confirmation of Einstein\u2019s prediction of gravitational waves. A team of astrophysicists wondered something else: Had the experiment found the \u201cdark matter\u201d that makes up most of the mass of the universe?<\/p>\n<p>The eight scientists from the Johns Hopkins Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy had already started making calculations when the discovery by the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ligo.caltech.edu\/\">Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)<\/a> was announced in February. Their results, published recently in <a href=\"http:\/\/journals.aps.org\/prl\/abstract\/10.1103\/PhysRevLett.116.201301\">Physical Review Letters<\/a>, unfold as a hypothesis suggesting a solution for an abiding mystery in astrophysics.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe consider the possibility that the black hole binary detected by LIGO may be a signature of dark matter,\u201d wrote the scientists in their summary, referring to the black hole pair as a \u201cbinary.\u201d What follows are five pages of annotated mathematical equations showing how the researchers considered the mass of the two objects LIGO detected as a point of departure, suggesting that these objects could be part of the mysterious substance known to make up about 85 percent of the mass of the universe.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"http:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2016-06-gravitational-detector-dark.html\">http:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2016&#45;06-gravitational-detector-dark.html<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When an astronomical observatory detected two black holes colliding in deep space, scientists celebrated confirmation of Einstein\u2019s prediction of gravitational waves. A team of astrophysicists wondered something else: Had the experiment found the \u201cdark matter\u201d that makes up most of the mass of the universe? The eight scientists from the Johns Hopkins Henry A. Rowland [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":387,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,41,2229,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-information-science","category-mathematics","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/387"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26926"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67191,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26926\/revisions\/67191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}