Gravitational Wave Detectors Record Most Massive Black Hole Collision
Space is an immense space that still keeps most of its secrets. So a scientific conglomerate LIGO and Virgo recorded gravitational waves that have come down to us from the most massive collision of black holes ever recorded. As a result of this "merger" was formed just a giant black hole, which was attributed to a completely new class.
Registration of the first collisions and the birth of a new supermassive black hole
For the first time, gravitational waves emanating from a collision of black holes have been detected LIGO in 2015. Since then, for all the time of work LIGO and Virgo a dozen gravitational signals were recorded.
And last year, a joint observation made it possible to fix a collision, as a result of which a black hole was born, the mass of which turned out to be twice as large as other black holes ever recorded using gravitational perturbations.
A signal with four short wobbles is registered under the number GW 190521 back on May 21, 2019.
Most likely, these were shock waves emanating from a collision that occurred in the distant past, namely about six billion years ago. At the same time, black holes with a mass of about 65 and 85 times more than our sun weighs in the collision.
As a result of this merger, a black hole with a mass of 142 solar masses appeared, and just the missing 8 masses of the sun were converted into pure energy and scattered across space in the form of gravitational waves.
What is the peculiarity of this event
The uniqueness of the collision lies in the fact that both the colliding and the born black hole had a mass significantly greater than any other ever observed with the help of gravitational waves.
Earlier, an event registered under the name CW 1700729, as a result of which there was a merger of black holes, masses of 50 and 34 solar masses, and formed one mass of 80 solar masses.
It would seem, and what's wrong with that, well, black holes of a larger mass collided and that's it. In fact, everything is much more complicated and the whole point is that black holes are conventionally divided into two categories:
- Black holes with stellar mass. Moreover, their weight is usually from 5 to several tens of solar masses.
- Supermassive black holes, the weight of which can reach millions and even billions of solar masses.
So astronomers put forward the theory that so-called intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs) could be located in such a large gap. Moreover, their mass should be in the range from 100 to 10,000 solar masses.
So the new hole with a mass of 142 Suns obtained as a result of the merger fits perfectly into the theoretical parameters.
But there is another oddity. So a black hole with a mass of 85 suns (participating in a merger) was too large to be formed as a result of a supernova explosion.
Instead, again, scientists speculate, this black hole was formed as a result of an earlier collision of lighter black holes.
It turns out that a new black hole with a mass of 142 suns contains several smaller black holes (like a Russian nesting doll).
This event allowed to put forward a new theory and link small black holes and supermassive ones. It turns out that supermassive black holes, which with their gravitational forces hold whole galaxies could have formed due to such numerous collisions over billions years.
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