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 10 billion 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.
Photo: Reuters
“These are the most violent events we can observe in the universe, but when the signals reach Earth, they are the weakest phenomena we can measure,” said Mark Hannam, head of the Gravity Exploration Institute at Cardiff University. “By the time these ripples wash up on Earth they are tiny.”
Evidence for the black hole collision arrived just before 2pm UK time on Nov. 23, 2023, when two US-based detectors in Washington and Louisiana, operated by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), twitched at the same time.
The sudden spasm in space-time caused the detectors to stretch and squeeze for 1/10th of a second, a fleeting moment that captured the so-called ringdown phase as the merged black holes formed a new one that “rang” before settling down.
Analysis of the signal revealed that the colliding black holes were 103 and 137 times the mass of the sun and spinning about 400,000 times faster than Earth, close to the theoretical limit for the objects.
“These are the highest masses of black holes we’ve confidently measured with gravitational waves,” said Hannam, a member of the LIGO scientific collaboration. “And they’re strange, because they are slap bang in the range of masses where, because of all kinds of weird things that happen, we don’t expect black holes to form.”
Most black holes form when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel and collapse at the end of their life cycle. The incredibly dense objects warp space-time so much that they create an event horizon, a boundary within which even light cannot escape.
Physicists at LIGO suspect the black holes that merged were themselves products of earlier mergers. That would explain how they came to be so massive and why they were spinning so fast, as merging black holes tend to impart spin on the object they create.
“We’ve seen hints of this before, but this is the most extreme example where that’s probably what’s happening,” Hannam said.
Scientists have detected about 300 black hole mergers from the gravitational waves they generate. Until now, the most massive merger known produced a black hole about 140 times the mass of the sun. The latest merger produced a black hole up to 265 times more massive than the sun. Details were to be presented yesterday at the GR-Amaldi meeting in Glasgow, Scotland.
A ship that appears to be taking on the identity of a scrapped gas carrier exited the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, showing how strategies to get through the waterway are evolving as the Middle East war progresses. The vessel identifying as liquefied natural gas (LNG) carrier Jamal left the Strait on Friday morning, ship-tracking data show. However, the same tanker was also recorded as having beached at an Indian demolition yard in October last year, where it is being broken up, according to market participants and port agent’s reports. The ship claiming to be Jamal is likely a zombie vessel that
Cannabis-based medicines have shown little evidence of effectiveness for treating most mental health and substance-use disorders, according to a large review of past studies published in a major medical journal on Monday. Medical use of cannabinoids has been expanding, including in the US, Canada and Australia, where many patients report using cannabis products to manage conditions such as anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and sleep problems. Researchers reviewed data from 54 randomized clinical trials conducted between 1980 and May last year involving 2,477 participants for their analysis published in The Lancet. The studies assessed cannabinoids as a primary treatment for mental disorders or substance-use
NATIONWIDE BLACKOUT: US President Donald Trump cut off Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba, strangling the Caribbean island’s already antiquated grid Cuba’s national electric grid collapsed on Monday, the nation’s grid operator said, leaving about 10 million people without power amid a US-imposed oil blockade that has crippled the already obsolete generation system. Grid operator UNE on social media said that it is investigating the causes of the blackout, the latest in a series of widespread outages that last for hours or days and that this weekend sparked a rare violent protest in the communist-run nation. Officials ruled out a major power plant failure, but had still not pinpointed the root cause of the grid collapse, suggesting a problem with transmission. Officials said that
‘HEALTH ISSUE’: More than 250 women are hospitalized every day due to complications from unsafe abortions, and about three die, a study showed Jane had been bleeding heavily for days before finally seeking help, not from a hospital, but from the man who sold her the pills meant to end her six-week pregnancy. Abortions are strictly outlawed in the mainly Catholic Philippines, forcing women to turn to a patchwork of providers operating in the online shadows. While rare in practice, Philippine law allows for prison terms of up to six years for abortion patients and providers, leaving thousands of Filipinas to search for solutions in online forums where unlicensed sellers promote abortifacients. “It was very painful, as if my abdomen was being twisted,” said Jane, whose
RSS