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21 April 2020
An unprecedented signal from unevenly sized objects gives astronomers rare insight into how black holes spin.
Image above: A visualization of a collision between two differently sized black holes. Image Credits: N. Fischer, H. Pfeiffer, A. Buonanno (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics), Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) Collaboration.
Gravitational-wave astronomers have for the first time detected a collision between two black holes of substantially different masses — opening up a new vista on astrophysics and on the physics of gravity. The event offers the first unmistakable evidence from these faint space-time ripples that at least one black hole was spinning before merging, giving astronomers rare insight into a key property of these these dark objects.
“It’s an exceptional event,” said Maya Fishbach, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago in Illinois. Similar mergers on which data have been published all took place between black holes with roughly equal masses, so this new one dramatically upsets that pattern, she says. The collision was detected last year, and was unveiled on 18 April by Fishbach and her collaborators at a virtual meeting of the American Physical Society, held entirely online because of the coronavirus pandemic.
GW190412: Binary Black Hole Merger
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) — a pair of twin detectors based in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana — and the Virgo observatory near Pisa, Italy, both detected the event, identified as GW190412, with high confidence on 12 April 2019. The LIGO–Virgo collaboration, which includes Fishbach, posted its findings on the arXiv preprint server.
LIGO made the first discovery of gravitational waves in September 2015, detecting the space-time ripples from two merging black holes. LIGO, later joined by Virgo, subsequently made ten more detections in two observing runs that ended in 2017: nine more black-hole mergers and one collision of two neutron stars, which helped to explain the origin of the Universe’s heavy chemical elements.
The third and most recent run started on 1 April 2019 and ended on 27 March 2020, with a month-long break in October. Greatly improved sensitivity enabled the network to accumulate around 50 more ‘candidate events’ at a rate of roughly one per week. Until now, the international collaboration had unveiled only one other event from this observation period — a second merger between two neutron stars, dubbed GW190425, that was revealed in January.
Related links:
Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO): https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/what-is-ligo
Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik (Albert-Einstein-Institut): https://www.aei.mpg.de/
Image (mentioned), Video, Text, Credits: Nature/Davide Castelvecchi/Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik (Albert-Einstein-Institut).
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