Browse the article Gravitational Waves Detected for a Third Time, Revealing
Another Black Hole Collision
LIGO was able to determine the location of
the black hole collision only to within an area spanning 600 square degrees of the sky.
Almost as soon as the detectors were turned on — even before scientific data - taking had formally begun — scientists detected the minuscule undulations of their first
black hole collision.
Because LIGO was able to detect two of these gravitational wave events within its first few months of running, scientists are confident that these sorts of
black hole collisions are actually pretty common in our neighborhood.
At the same time, the researchers are upgrading the detectors so that they can spot neutron star and
black hole collisions even farther away.
Black hole collisions are one of the few events in the universe that are catastrophic enough to produce spacetime gyrations big enough to detect.
Scientists may soon be able to tease out a faint signal of gravitational waves from
black hole collisions too distant to be detected directly, scientists with LIGO, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational - Wave Observatory, report in the April...
And a spacecraft called Lisa Pathfinder launched last December to test technology for a proposed space - based observatory that will be sensitive to longer - wavelength gravitational waves from supermassive
black hole collisions.
LIGO's breakthrough discovery offers up new ways to test relativity,
black hole collisions, dark energy, the first stars in the universe, and more
The powerful blasts of particles and light energy known as gamma - ray bursts come from violent cosmic events in deep space, such as stellar explosions and
black hole collisions.
As more
black hole collisions are found, researchers hope to piece together how and where these destructive duos form.
Since that first detection, scientists have observed three more
black hole collisions.
Catching more
black hole collisions will also help map out their distribution in the universe, which is nearly impossible to do any other way.
The researchers started by analyzing the three gravitational wave events that were detected by LIGO and attempted to see if all three
black hole collisions evolved in the same way, which they call «classical isolated binary evolution via a common - envelope phase.»
Not exact matches
For comparison, the
collision detected in September created a
black hole with the equivalent of 62 solar masses, blasting out 50 times more energy than all the stars in the universe combined.
@Vic: «but I can tell you that things like the Big Bang, the Multiverse, etc. are theories at best, and the Theory of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are in a direct
collision course when it comes to the
Black Holes, and Gravity is the show stopper for a Unified Field Theory, and so on and so forth.»
Today, some 25 years later, the Large Hadron Collider at Cern has just been switched on, prompting fears in some quarters that the
collisions it produces could generate a mini
black hole that could swallow the earth.
Elusive gravitational waves, meanwhile, can reveal unseen
collisions between stellar corpses, such as
black holes and neutron stars.
Collisions between supermassive
black holes (SN Online: 8/31/15) can be heard from much farther away, but they send out long, undulating waves to which LIGO is deaf.
Their
collision was fast and violent, likely spawning a
black hole.
Scouting out the locales where
black hole pairs live allows astronomers to look for light produced in the
collision.
During the
collision, approximately three solar masses were converted into energy and radiated as gravitational waves, leaving behind a 53 - solar - mass
black hole.
As early as 2021 it will be joined by the Einstein Probe, a wide - field x-ray sentinel for transient phenomena such as gamma ray bursts and the titanic
collisions of neutron stars or
black holes that generate gravitational waves.
Gravitational waves detectable from Earth are generated by
collisions of massive objects, such as when two
black holes or neutron stars merge.
Rainer Weiss, a German - born American physicist, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, took a defining step when he authored a 1972 paper on the design of a laser - based interferometer to detect the
collision of
black holes in outer space that would take more than a billion years to reach Earth.
Computer simulations suggest that when two
black holes spiral towards each other on a
collision course, much of the gas and dust in the spinning accretion disc surrounding each of them is ripped away by the gravity of the other.
The resulting stellar debris, swirling ever closer to the
black hole, collided with itself, giving off bursts of optical and UV light at the
collision sites.
In a hopeful sign for humankind, the U.S. National Science Foundation put up the money and two
black holes provided the
collision in 2015, as reported in February 2016 in Physical Review Letters and widely celebrated by bloggers.
From simulations run by others, the researchers conclude that the optical and UV bursts likely originated from the
collision of stellar debris on the outer perimeter of the
black hole.
The likeliest mechanism is the arrival of a second massive
black hole during a galaxy
collision, say Merritt and his colleague, radio astronomer Ron Ekers of the Australia Telescope National Facility in Sydney.
Further, cosmic rays create particle
collisions of comparable energy all the time, and if dangerous
black holes could exist, they would have already destroyed all the structures we observe in the universe.
There, young stars, born during the merger, will explode as supernovas, and a quasar — a giant
black hole ignited by the galactic
collision — might spew energetic radiation.
«It occurred to me that a fairly easy way to flip a
black hole would be a
collision with another
black hole,» he told New Scientist.
And the signal they heard was both clear and complete, encompassing not just the insprial and
collision, but what's called the «ringdown,» the aftershock as the
black hole settles into its new shape.
And as LIGO continues to detect more
collisions, the data about
black holes will keep piling up.
LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, is a pair of three - mile - long gravitational - wave detectors in Washington and Louisiana that cost $ 365 million and took 11 years to build, and yet they may just barely be able to pick up signals from the ultraviolent
collisions that give birth to massive
black holes.
The cuddled - up pair are closer to each other than any other known
black hole duo, providing astronomers a first peek at the final stages of a possible
collision.
They may be a new class of midsize
black holes, weighing 100 solar masses or so, which could have formed either by the
collision of smaller
black holes or by the death of supermassive stars.
Current theories suggest that the seeds of these
black holes were the result of either the growth and collapse of the first generation of stars in the Universe;
collisions between stars in dense stellar clusters; or the direct collapse of extremely massive stars in the early Universe.
Scientists led by Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology ran the huge cosmological simulations that can be used to predict the rate at which gravitational waves caused by
collisions between the monster
black holes might be detected.
The core of each galaxy may contain a
black hole, or the
collision itself may create a
black hole.
As each of these theories predicts different initial masses for the seeds of supermassive
black hole seeds, the
collisions would produce different gravitational wave signals.
No
collisions have been observed directly, but astronomers have found several pairs of
black holes that are very close to each other, including some that are orbiting each other and some that seem to be on course for a
collision.
Two detections of gravitational waves caused by
collisions between supermassive
black holes should be possible each year using space - based instruments such as the Evolved Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (eLISA) detector that is due to launch in 2034, the researchers said.
As the
collision tossed gas onto the
black holes, large amounts of energy were produced, triggering the quasar.
«In the details of a
collision and in terms of the gravitational waves, you could see the formation of a new
black hole.»
Both sets of cosmic quivers were wrought in cataclysmic
collisions of
black holes.
Perhaps it is through the spiraling
collision of stars or star - size
black holes in the overcrowded galactic core.
It's not understood what is causing the
black holes to become newly active, because in most cases there is no evidence of
collisions or mergers.
Typical
collisions produce moderate numbers of high - energy particles, but a decaying
black hole is different.