The two black holes had respectively a mass equal to 66 and 85 times that of the Sun. Their merger gave rise to a single black hole of 142 solar masses which was named GW190521. The rest, equal to about 9 solar masses, where did it go? It transformed into energy, in line with what Einstein predicted over a century ago, which was used to generate the gravitational waves that deformed space-time and which were observed on Earth by the two interferometers on May 21 last year. Ligo and from that Virgo. The announcement of the discovery took place on 2 September, on the occasion of the publication of the studies on Physical Review Letters e Astrophysical Journal Letters. The discovery was also attended by Italian scientists of the Virgo interferometer in Cascina, near Pisa.
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Exceptionality
The uniqueness of this news is that it is the first discovery of a black hole in an intermediate mass range. But not only that, because the one of 85 solar masses that merged with the smaller one “challenges our understanding of the mechanisms of black hole formation”, as underlined in a note from the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (Infn) , as “on the basis of current models, a black hole of 85 solar masses cannot form from the collapse of a massive star.” “The observations of Virgo and Ligo are shedding light on the dark universe and are defining a new cosmic landscape,” commented Giovanni Losurdo, head of the international Virgo collaboration.
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The distance
The brightness distance of the source that produced the gravitational wave signal, revealed by the three interferometers, was estimated to be about 17 billion light years. The distance of brightness is a good approximation of a Euclidean type distance that does not take into account the expansion of the universe. In terms of time, the merger took place about 7 billion years ago in the middle of the evolution of our universe.
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September 2, 2020 (change September 2, 2020 | 16:49)
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