#and binary star systems in general 🥰 also u cannot deny

[daisychainsandbowties]

Reading through NatGeo, found an article on colossal gravitational waves, and immediately thought of you and the palmer station au.

But, scientists have have detected low-frequency gravitational waves with a wavelength so long it would takes years to decades for travel from crest to crest. They think it was caused by two supermassive black hole binaries.

i LOVE gravitational waves. i think Einstein predicted their existence back around the 1910s but it took until the 70s to develop instruments capable of truly measuring them. like black holes they’re quite harmless to us, but where supermassive black holes hoard everything about themselves from us - light not quick enough to escape to our eyes - gravitational waves are what they can’t help but give, despite their nature.

we talk about the beauty of small things a lot when we talk about the universe, but there’s beauty, too, in that which is incomprehensibly big, so much so that they, in turn, become like the smallest things. explosions that can touch us clear across the cosmos, but the remnants are a thousand billion times fainter than what caused them. yet still detectable.

i think beatrice would love that. explaining it to lilith by dropping a pebble into a cup of still water, so the ripples fan out to the sides and “okay, but imagine the cup has no sides. the ripples would travel in all directions, moving beyond our ability to perceive them but still there. imagine if i dropped a pebble into the ocean here and they felt it on mars.”

trying to explain it to ava who keeps interrupting her tongue into bea’s mouth

ava: so these binary neutron stars or supermassive black holes or whatever are locked together in like,.. an embrace?

ava: i get it, like an orgasm but REALLY big

and beatrice rolling her eyes like “ava i know you have a master’s degree in mathematics.”