Researchers studying the consequences of the collision of giant black holes have confirmed gravitational
According to a new study published inNature magazine, a phenomenon known as precession is similar to the oscillatory motion sometimes seen in black holes when they merge into one. As the two massive objects approached, they caused huge ripples in the fabric of space-time, known as gravitational waves, that propagated through space, carrying away energy and angular momentum from the merged black holes.
For the first time, scientists have discovered these waves emanating fromblack holes, in 2020 using the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US and the Virgo gravitational wave sensors in Italy. Now, after several years of studying wave patterns, researchers have confirmed that one of the black holes was spinning at a record speed of 10 billion faster than ever.
The researchers observed precession at all stages,but not in such large objects as black hole binary systems, in which two "cosmic vacuum cleaners" revolve around a common center. However, Einstein's general theory of relativity predicted over 100 years ago that precession should occur in objects as large as binary black holes.
“We always thought that binary black holes coulddo it,” study author Mark Hannam, director of the Institute for Gravity Research at Cardiff University in the UK, said in a statement. “We have been hoping to find such an example ever since the first gravitational waves were discovered. We had to wait five years and do more than 80 studies.”
The black holes in question are many timesmore massive than the Sun, and the largest of them is estimated at about 40 solar masses. Researchers first became aware of the binary pair in 2020, when LIGO and Virgo recorded an explosion of gravitational waves released by the alleged collision of two black holes. The team named this collision GW200129, after the date it was discovered.
For example, in May 2022, a group of researcherscalculated that the merger of two black holes was both massive and one-sided: gravitational waves escaped from the collision in one direction, while the new merged black hole was probably "thrown" out of its home galaxy at a speed of more than 4.8 million km / h in the opposite direction.
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