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September 2, 2020
142 times the mass of the sun, "GW190521" is the most massive black hole ever detected. It is also the oldest such celestial object ever discovered.
Image above: The mysterious object is probably the result of the merger of two black holes. Image Credits: D. Ferguson, K. Jani, D. Shoemaker, P. Laguna, Georgia Tech, MAYA Collaboration.
It took 7 billion light years to reach us: a massive black hole of a new type, no doubt the result of the merger of two black holes, was directly observed for the first time thanks to gravitational waves, revealed Wednesday two studies.
"A new cosmic landscape"
This discovery constitutes the first direct proof of the existence of black holes of intermediate mass (between 100 and 100,000 times more massive than the Sun) and could explain one of the enigmas of cosmology: the formation of supermassive black holes, lurking in the heart of certain galaxies, including the Milky Way.
"It is a door which opens on a new cosmic landscape!", Welcomed during a press conference Stavros Katsanevas, the director of Virgo, one of the two detectors of gravitational waves which captured signals from this new black hole.
Spacetime ripples from the most massive binary black hole merger ever observed (GW190521)
The mysterious object, described in Physical Review Letters and Astrophysical Journal Letters by an international team of more than 1,500 scientists, is called "GW190521". Probably the result of the fusion of two black holes, it is 142 times the mass of the sun and forms the most massive black hole ever detected by gravitational waves.
Space-time distortions
Predicted by Albert Einstein in 1915 in his theory of general relativity and observed directly a century later, gravitational waves are tiny deformations of space-time, similar to ripples of water on the surface of a pond. They are born under the influence of violent cosmic phenomena, such as the fusion of two black holes which emit a phenomenal amount of energy.
LIGO & VIRGO Instruments description
GW190521's gravitational wave took 7 billion years to reach us: it is the most distant black hole, and therefore the oldest, ever discovered.
The signal was recorded in May 2019 by the American Ligo and European Virgo instruments, which sign "the biggest catch in their hunting table" since their first discoveries in 2015 and 2017, details the CNRS, of which several researchers have contributed to the studies.
Related links:
Ligo: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/ligos-ifo
Virgo: https://www.virgo-gw.eu/
CNRS: https://www.cnrs.fr/en
Images, Video, Text, Credits: ATS/Ligo & Virgo/Orbiter.ch Aerospace/Roland Berga.
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