Can you hear the echoes from the abyss? If not, come to my talk!

Image Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/C. Henze Recently, with Jahed Abedi and Hannah Dykaar, we found gravitational wave signatures for quantum gravity effects near black hole horizons. If you'd like to hear more about this, and you're in Waterloo, come to my seminar tomorrow:

• Jan. 16 (Mon), 10am, in MC6460 (Univ. of Waterloo), Prof. Niayesh Afshordi (UW, PI)

Our original paper can be found here, with additional press coverage (in various languages):

• Echoes of a Black Hole (Aeon, Mar. 2017)
• Rätselhaftes Echo aus Schwarzem Loch (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, Jan. 2017)
• Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is 100 Years Old, But May Not Last (Inverse.COM, Dec. 2016)
• پژواکی از مغاک: شواهدی از ساختارهایی به اندازه پلانک در افق سیاهچاله ,آذر ۱۳۹۵
• Echoes from the Abyss (One Universe at a Time, Dec. 2016)
• LIGO black hole echoes hint at general-relativity breakdown (Nature News, Dec.  2016)
• Has LIGO Already Discovered Evidence For Quantum Gravity? (Forbes.COM, Dec. 2016)

In a second paper, which just appeared on arXiv, we clarify some of the misunderstandings about our finding. Delayed echoes from Planck-scale structure near black hole horizons predict a peak at x=1 in this plot. As can be seen, analysis of LIGO gravitational wave data indeed shows such a peak with >99% confidence level (from arXiv:1701.03485)