LIGO researchers spotted a second black
hole merger before ending the observation run on 12 January.
We'll need to see more black
hole mergers before we can tell, though — the signal doesn't give a clear answer either way.
Not exact matches
So if we see black
hole merger events
before stars existed, then we'll know that those black
holes are not of stellar origin.»
The detected signal comes from the last 27 orbits of the black
holes before their
merger.
He was also working on other LIGO papers at the time, including one about an earlier detection of a black -
hole merger which now needed to be published
before it could be eclipsed by the neutron - star
merger announcement.
«This is a tantalizing discovery with a low chance of being a false alarm, but
before we can start rewriting the textbooks, we'll need to see more bursts associated with gravitational waves from black
hole mergers,» study lead author Valerie Connaughton, of the National Space, Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Alabama, said in a statement.
An interesting theory from early 2015,
before the first black
hole merger signal had been detected, drafts a compelling scenario, formulated by Madrid professor Juan Garcia - Bellido and postdoc Sebastien Clesse from RWTH Aachen University: maybe the universe is crowded with black
holes of various sizes, remnants of large density fluctuations during the so - called inflation phase of the Big Bang.
The research team led by Satoru Iguchi, Associate Professor of NAOJ, succeeded in observing a very close binary black
hole in the center of 3C66B (a giant elliptical galaxy within the cluster A347) just
before its black
hole merger.
However, the team say the current findings should help scientists better understand what happens
before a black
hole merger and how galaxies evolve.