Samsing Institute / Niels Bohr
In 2019, the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration captured gravitational wave signals from black hole mergers that proved to be one of the record books. Dubbed ‘GW190521’, it was the most massive and farthest ever detected, producing the most energetic signal detected to date, appearing in the data as louder than the usual ‘chirp’.
Furthermore, the new black hole resulting from the merger is about 150 times more powerful than our sun’s weight, making GW190521 the first direct observation of a medium-mass black hole. Stranger still, the two merging black holes are locked in an elliptical (rather than circular) orbit, and their axis of rotation is tilted more than usual than the orbit.
Physicists want nothing more than to present interesting puzzles that don’t seem to fit directly into established theory, and GW190521 provides them with just that. New theoretical simulations suggest that all of these odd aspects can be explained by the presence of a third black hole that beats the final dance of the binary system to produce a “messy dance,” according to new paper Published in Nature magazine.
like us I mentioned beforeOn May 21, 2019, collaboration detectors picked up the black hole’s binary merging signal: four short vibrations lasting less than a tenth of a second. The shorter the signal, the more massive the merging black holes – in this case, 85 and 66 solar masses, respectively. The black holes combine to form new black holes that are larger than about 142 solar masses, emitting the equivalent of eight solar masses in the process – thus, a strong signal is picked up by the detector.
What makes this event so unusual is that the measurement of 142 solar masses lies in the center of what is known as the black hole’s “mass gap”. Most of these objects fall into two groups: stellar-mass black holes (ranging from a few solar masses to tens of solar masses) and supermassive black holes, such as those in the center of our Milky Way (ranging from hundreds of thousands to billions of solar masses). The former is caused by the death of a massive star in a collapsing supernova at its core, while the formation process of the latter remains a mystery.
LEGO / Caltech / MIT / R. Sakit (IPAC)
The fact that the ancestor of black holes weighed 85 solar masses is also unusual because it contradicts current models of stellar evolution. The type of star that would give rise to a black hole between 65 and 135 solar masses would not turn into a supernova, and therefore would not end up as a black hole. Instead, these stars will become unstable and lose most of their mass. Only then would they become supernovas — but the result would be black holes less than 65 solar masses.
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