Ripples in space-time from collision recorded by gravitational wave detector forces a rethink of how the objects form
Scientists have detected ripples in space-time from the violent collision of two massive black holes that spiralled into one another far beyond the distant edge of the Milky Way.
The black holes, each more than 100 times the mass of the sun, began circling each other long ago and finally slammed together to form an even more massive black hole about 10bn light years from Earth.
The event is the most massive black hole merger ever recorded by gravitational wave detectors and has forced physicists to rethink their models of how the enormous objects form. The signal was recorded when it hit detectors on Earth sensitive enough to detect shudders in space-time thousands of times smaller than the width of a proton.
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How does the work? 103 solar masses plus 137 solar masses should be 240 less any mass lost due to radiation during the event.
Ligo provides great science summaries for most publications, here is the one for this.
So it seems 137 and 103 solar masses are the best estimates for each single black hole before merger. Due to uncertainty however, their total mass is in the range of 190-265 solar masses, of which 182-251 remain after merger. The rest of mass is emitted as gravitational waves.
https://www.iop.org/events/24th-international-conference-general-relativity-and-gravitation-16th-edoardo-amaldi
If you happen to be in Glasgow today, maybe you can ask them?
In seriousness… I don’t think anyone actually has a rock solid theoretical explanation of how that uh, works.
Best I can give you is… maybe they vaccuumed up some other stuff in the process of merging?
Beyond that, or ‘error bounds’, I defer to the IOP, lol.
How big is the super massive black hole at the center of our galaxy?
Assuming you mean ‘how massive’:
… roughly 4.3 million solar masses, 4.3 million of our Sun.
They don’t call them ‘supermassive blackholes’ for nothing, lol.
Thanks. So I’m wondering what’s so special about these black holes in OP that are like 10bn light years away. Seems like this thing would happen frequently and much closer to us. Though it’s interesting that we can observe them.
Well what is special is… we, as a species, basically just invented (in the last 10 years or so) the ability to measure gravitational waves, that is to say, fluctuations in the fabric of spacetime itself, that reverberate outward from gravitationally extreme events such as a black hole merger.
Further… I am fairly sure this is the first time we have been able to ‘view’ or ‘see’ or ‘witness’ a blackhole merger with such gravitational wave detecting technology.
So… imagine being the first person to look at the sun with a properly bandwidth blocking lense or system, such that you can see in much more detail the surface, now you can see coronal loops.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronal_loop
Similar to that, being able to ‘view’ a black hole merger with our new gravity wave ‘lenses’ gives us a whole bunch of useful information we did not have before.
That and uh, as far as I know, black hole mergers are just not very common, in general.
But… we really wouldn’t know that for sure, on account of being… you know, black holes, kinda hard to see directly, prior to gravity wave detectors, and other very recently developed imaging techniques, we had to figure out they existed by calculating how light bends around them before it gets to us, and then work backwards to figure out where they are, or just ‘huh, a bunch of stuff seems to be orbiting around… nothing?’
We have not been able to directly observe them until fairly recently, even just as far back as the 90s, when I was a kid, a fair amount of astrophysicists were still in the ‘they’re just theoretical and we can’t actually definitively prove they exist’ camp.
Like, it wasn’t untill 2018 that we had the first actual direct image of a blackhole, Messier 87’s supermassive blackhole.