Black holes: Cosmic signals bloom on Earth after 7 billion years

Imagine the image of the eight suns illuminated in an instant.

This is the gravitational “shockwave” that spreads through the largest merger observed between the two black holes.

The signal of this event traveled nearly seven billion years to reach Earth, but it was strong enough to speed up laser detectors in the US and Italy in May last year.

Researchers say that colliding black holes formed a single entity with a mass 122 times that of our Sun.

This is notable. Science has long discovered the presence of black holes in the sky that are a little too small or too big. But this new observation inaugurates a novel class of so-called intermediate-sized black holes in a range of 100-1,000 Sun (or solar) masses.

The analysis coming out of the international LIGO-Virgo collaboration that operates three super-sensitive gravity wave-detection systems in the US and Europe is the latest.

Media playback is unsupported on your device

What is a black hole?

• A black hole is an area of ​​space where matter itself has broken down
• The gravitational pull is so strong that no event light, nothing can escape
• Black holes will surely come out of the explosive death of big stars
• But some are really harsh and have billions of times the number of our sun
• How these monsters – found on galaxy centers – is unknown
• Black holes effectively detect the effects of their surroundings
• They produce observable gravitational waves as they go into each other

Collaborative laser interferometer devices “listen” to space-time vibrations that are actually generated by catastrophic cosmic events – and on May 21, 2019, they were all provoked by a sharp signal lasting only a tenth of a second.

Computer algorithms determined the source to be the final phase moments of two in-spiraling black holes – one 66 times times our sun and the other solar. With solar mass.

The merger distance was estimated to be equivalent to 150 billion trillion km.

“It’s really amazing,” said Nelson Christensen, a professor at the C ડીte d’Azur observatory in France. “This signal has been circulating for seven billion years. So this phenomenon became ‘halftime before’ for the universe, and now it has mechanically moved our detectors here on Earth,” he explained to BBC News.

Gravitational waves – space-time waves

• Gravitational waves are predictions of the general theory of relativity
• It took decades for technology to develop directly
• They are ripples in the space-time fabric created by violent events
• The accelerating mass will produce waves propagating at the speed of light
• Sources that can be found include the merging of black holes and neutron stars
• LIGO-VIRGO fire lasers in long, L-shaped tunnels; The waves interfere with the light
• Finding waves opens up the universe for a whole new investigation

The involvement of the 85-solar-mass object object in this collision has contributed to scientists because their understanding of how black holes are formed by the death of a star does not really contribute anything to this scale.

Stars, when they exhale their nuclear fuel, will experience an explosive core collapse to form a black hole – if they are large enough. But the physics that is supposed to operate the stars inside suggests that it is impossible to produce black holes in a mass range between 65 and 120 solar masses. The dying stars that can produce such celebrities really tear themselves apart and leave nothing behind.

If the science on this issue is correct, the probable explanation for the existence of the 85-solar-mass object object is that it itself was the result of a previous black hole union.

And he believes that the Martin Hendry of the University of Glasgow in the UK has implications for the development of the universe.

“We’re talking about the hierarchy of mergers here, the potential way to make bigger and bigger black holes,” he said. “So, who knows? This 142-solar-mass black hole could merge with another very large black hole – part of the build-up process that goes the way we think of the supermassive black hole. The heart of the galaxy.”

The LIGO-Virgo collaboration has reported the May 21, 2019 incident (described as GW190521) in the papers of two scholars.

A journal is in physical review letters and describes the discovery. The second can be found in astrophysical journal letters, and discusses the physical properties and scientific effects of the signal.

GW190521 is one of more than 50 gravitational waves currently being tested in laser laboratories.

The pace of research has accelerated since the first, Nobel Prize-winning discovery of gravitational waves by collaboration in 2015.

“We are increasing the sensitivity of the detectors and, yes, we can check more than once a day. We will have a rain of black holes! But this is beautiful because we will learn a lot about them,” Prof. Alessandra Bunanno, director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, told BBC News.

• A laser is fed into the machine and its beam splits along two paths
• Different paths bounce back and forth between the damp mirrors
• Eventually, the two light parts are rearranged and sent to the detector
• Gravitational waves passing through the lab should disrupt the set-up
• The theory is that they should extend and squeeze the space very finely
• This should present itself as a change in the length of the light arms
• The photodetector captures this signal in a rearranged beam

[email protected] And follow me on twitter: BBCAmos