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| This visualization shows what Einstein envisioned. Researchers crunched Einstein's theory of general relativity on the Columbia supercomputer at the NASA Ames Research Center to create a three-dimensional simulation of merging black holes. This simulation provides the foundation to explore the universe in an entirely new way, through the detection of gravitational waves. (MPEG, duration 00:00:30, size 7.45 Mb). [Credit: NASA] |
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| The fleet of Constellation-X spacecraft that will together provide a 100 times the sensitivity of current X-ray telescopes. (MPEG, duration 00:00:13.10, size 2.09 MB) [Credit: NASA] |
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| The three LISA spacecraft, tethered together by lasers, will act as buoys in the sea of spacetime and detect the passing of gravitational waves. (MPEG, duration 00:01:11.22, size 16.5 MB) [Credit: NASA] |
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| A powerful X-ray flare echoes across the black hole accretion disk and creates distortions in the spectrum of the K-shell fluorescent line of Fe. Constellation-X can measure these distortions and use the predictions of General Relativity to determine the mass and spin of the black hole. These measurements may even yield a test of the validity of General Relativity. (QuickTime, duration 00:00:17.01, size 3.60 MB) [Credit: NASA] |
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The central regions of galaxies contain numerous stellar-mass black holes. Occasionally, one of these can be captured into an orbit around the central supermassive black hole and emit observable levels of gravitational waves. Subsequently, the orbit will decay and the frequency and intensity of the observed gravitational waves will increase. Eventually, the two black holes will merge. (MPEG, duration 00:01:00.18, size 23.1 MB) [Credit: NASA]
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| A pair of black holes in close orbit around each other will emit gravitational waves. Their orbits will decay and they will eventually coalesce into a single black hole. This violent event releases a large pulse of gravitational waves. The remaining single black hole soon settles into a quiescent state. (MPEG, duration 00:00:27.11, size 14.33 MB) [Credit: NASA] |
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| This site provides animations of cosmology-related concepts as well as the results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). [Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team] |
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| Visual resources available from the Universe Education forum include animations and video clips as well as real data visualizations. [Credit: Courtesy of the NASA-Smithsonian Universe Education Forum] |
