Dead Planets Society #3: Gravitational Wave Apocalypse

As if burrowing through a planet and blowing up the sun weren’t enough… This time, Chelsea and Leah hope to harness the power of gravitational waves to destroy everything we know and love. 

Christopher Berry at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)  explains how they could create their own gravitational waves using a bespoke black hole machine, and helps them understand how to control such a device for their nefarious purposes…

Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish ideas about how to tinker with the cosmos – from punching a hole in a planet to unifying the asteroid belt to destroying the sun – and subjects them to the laws of physics to see how they fare.

Your hosts are Leah Crane and Chelsea Whyte.

If you have a cosmic object you’d like to figure out how to destroy, email the team at deadplanets@newscientist.com. It may just feature in a later episode… And if you just want to chat about this episode or wrecking the cosmos more generally, tweet @chelswhyte and @downhereonearth.

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