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RE: General relativity 101 - Gravitational waves in a nutshell

in #steemstem6 years ago (edited)

I was watching a video on the merging black hole event and I think they said that the power output at the moment of the merger was 50 times the power output of the observable universe (at least for that fraction of a second).

My question is:

If a life form was "close" to this event, say a million km away, would the spacetime distortion kill that creature? Or would the creature just distort along with the spacetime and never notice a thing?

Source:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/black-hole-smashup-generated-yottawatts-power

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The magnitude of the ripples are of about 10-19m. In this case, I don't think this will kill anything. The creature won't even notice such a distortion. By the way, gravitational waves are going through Earth all the time and we don't even detect them.