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Imagine the energy of eight suns released in an instant. This is the gravitational “shock wave” that has spread after the largest merger ever observed between two black holes. The wave traveled for about seven billion years to reach Earth, but it was strong enough to be observed by laser detectors in the United States and Italy in May last year, the BBC reports.
The researchers say that the collision of the two black holes produced an entity with a mass 142 times that of our Sun.
This is noteworthy in itself. Scientists have long followed the presence of black holes in the sky, which are either much smaller or much larger. But now a new class of so-called intermediate-sized black holes appears, which have a mass 100-1,000 times that of the sun.
Furthermore, the phenomenon observed last year could explain one of the enigmas of cosmology: the formation of supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies, including the center of the Milky Way.
“It is a door that opens to a new cosmic landscape!” Said Stavros Katsanevas, director of the Virgo project, one of two gravitational wave detectors that captured the signals emitted by this black hole.
The mysterious cosmic object, described in Physical Review Letters and Astrophysical Journal Letters by an international team of more than 1,500 scientists, has been named “GW190521”. Most likely due to the merger of two black holes, it has a mass 142 times that of the Sun and is the most massive black hole ever detected by gravitational waves, according to Agerpres.
Gravitational waves, predicted by Albert Einstein in 1915 in the theory of general relativity and observed directly a century later, are small fluctuations in the curvature of space-time, similar to the oscillations of water on the surface of a pond. They are born under the effect of violent cosmic phenomena, such as the merger of two black holes, a process that emits a phenomenal amount of energy.
It took 7 billion years for the gravitational wave emitted by GW190521 to reach Earth – this is the furthest black hole, and therefore the oldest, discovered by researchers.
The signal was recorded in May 2019 by the American instrument Ligo and the European Virgo, which made the “biggest capture” after their first discoveries in 2015 and 2017, specialists from the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) detailed. Several CNRS researchers participated in the two studies published Wednesday.
Web Editor: Monica Bonea
