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“New” black holes shake space

Gravitational waves have betrayed the existence of objects that previously escaped astrophysicists.

This image distributed by the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics on September 2, 2020 shows a simulation of a binary fusion of black holes.
This image distributed by the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics on September 2, 2020 shows a simulation of a binary fusion of black holes. N. FISCHERH. PFEIFFERA. BUONANNO / AFP

It was brief but rich in lessons. On May 21, 2019, three gravitational wave detectors (the two American Ligo and the European Virgo) recorded at the same time or almost a space-time tremor which lasted only a tenth of a second!

It is the shortest “space earthquake” recorded to date, but also the one which corresponds to the most energetic event: two black holes of 85 and 66 solar masses have merged to form a new black hole of 142 solar masses, a record (the missing mass corresponds to the energy dissipated in the form of gravitational waves). It is almost twice the mass of the previous record. “We quickly realized that we were dealing with something different ”recalls Nelson Christensen, director of the Artemis laboratory at the Côte d’Azur Observatory. It is also the most distant fusion ever detected, and the signal took 7 billion years to reach us, just over half the age of the Universe.

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