[mudil]

Here's what I don't understand.

In the first detection, they mentioned that two black holes collapsed, emitted gravitational waves, and the resulting combined mass was less than then sum of two previous masses because energy was spent on gravitational wave generation. Hence it means, that due to gravitational interactions, objects leak mass. Now, we know that every object in the universe is gravitationally related to every other object, plus universe is expanding hence objects are constantly in flux with each other. The question is where all the leaked mass goes? Can this leakage account for dark matter? What about the space-time, does it function as a storage medium for this energy that now came from the leaked mass?

Please explain...

[lnx01]

Objects do no leak mass due to gravitational interaction, but gravitational interaction always expends some energy. The earth orbiting the sun expends some energy in the form of gravitational waves but it's miniscule. It is enough though that the earth's orbit decays measurably.

This experiment is designed to detect the waves carrying away that lost energy, but you need a cataclysmic event like the collision of two black holes for the event to be energetic enough that you can measure it and measure it on astronomical scales.

This is the reason why LIGO must be so sensitive, we hope not to experience a nearby black hole collision for as long as we're alive, so we must measure a distant one.

Mass and energy are interchangeable but they both must be conserved.

They didn't leak mass, the missing mass became energy in the form of emission (photons and some kinetic) and gravitational waves, which until recently we could not detect. The equations suggested they were there though, and that's why these experiments were funded, a way to find out if the uncertainties in the standard model were true or not. At this point, our model seems to predict what we track in reality with this experiment.

Of course, there are gaps in the standard model and they must all be tested. LHC is also looking at the gaps, and confirming/invalidating them.

[grigjd3]

It's important to note that gravitational waves themselves contain energy and angular momentum. Relativists often use the terms mass and energy interchangeably. When I worked in numerical relativity, we used units such that the speed of light was 1, so E=mc^2 (really E^2=m^2c^4+p^2) simplifies to E=m.

[nthcolumn]

I have no idea what these people are talking about but I always thought as a small child that c should = 1. That square really bugged me - why squared, why not cubed or halved or more realistically some bally awkward number... Sounds like fun this numerical relativity!

[Chronos]

It's squared because energy is work, work is force times displacement (distance), force is mass times acceleration, acceleration is velocity per time, and velocity is vector distance per time. So you get:

mass × distance × ((distance ÷ time) ÷ time)

mass × distance^2 ÷ time^2

mass × (distance ÷ time)^2

[iaw]

E = mc^2

"Mass" in a blackhole is not the same as mass here on earth. The likely answer to your question is that the mass was converted to energy in the form of gravitational waves.