Astronomers discovered two black holes with unprecedented details, providing the clearest view of the nature of these cosmic oddities and confirming the long -term forecasts of legendary physicists Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.
The event, known as GW250114, became a well-known January when researchers noticed it with a laser interferome-grupitational wave Observatory (LIGO)-a set of two identical instruments located in Livingstone, Louisiana and Hanford, Washington. The instruments have discovered gravitational waves, weak vibrations of space and time created by two black holes emanating from each other.
In the search for gravitational waves, 1915 Predicted phenomena as part of Einstein’s theory of relativity are the only way to determine the collisions of black holes from the ground. Einstein thought the waves would be too weak, that they would ever be chosen by human technology, but in 2015 September Ligo first recorded them and later set off the Nobel Prize for three scientists who made an important contribution to the development of this development. “Black hole telescope”.
The newly discovered black holes were about 30-35 times higher than the solar mass, and they rotate very slowly, said Maximiliano Isi, Assistant and Astrophysicist at the University of Columbia, Astrophysicist at the Flaterron Institute Counting Astrophysics Center in New York. ISI was led by a new study by Ligo-Virgo-Kagra collaboration with GW250114, which on Wednesday published the Physical Review Letters.
“The black holes were about 1 billion light -years away, and they ran with each other an almost perfect circle,” ISI said. “The resulting black hole was about 63 times larger than the solar mass, and it spun 100 turns per second.”
According to ISI, the merger of these characteristics is almost an accurate copy of that first, innovative detection 10 years ago. “But now, since the instruments have improved so much, we can see these two black holes with a much clearer, because they are approaching each other and merged into one,” he added.
ISI said the observation to scientists gives a whole new view of “space and time dynamics”.
Einstein and a two -tone ring
Ligo, which also contains two smaller sisters ‘instruments – Virgo in Italy and Kagra in Japan – owns about 1600 researchers’ global scientific community. It operates in the discovery of small stretching in space caused by gravitational waves, which mean “a change in distance, which is 1000 times smaller than the atomic nucleus,” as ISI says. The researchers have used it so far observing more than 300 black holes merger.
Earlier this year, the instrument has set the largest among the two black holes so far, about 100 and 140 times the sunshine.
Since his debut, some of the main components of LIGO, including lasers and mirrors, have been updated to increase accuracy and reduce background noise. This improved productivity has become a new observation more than three times more accurate than the inaugural decade ago.
This unprecedented clarity allowed astronomers to use GW250114 to confirm the forecasts about black holes made several decades ago by famous physicists.
The first forecast, which in 1963 Created by New Zealand mathematician Roy Kerr, based on Einstein’s general relativity and states that black holes should be paradoxically simple objects described by one equation.
“Yes, black holes are very mysterious, complex and have a major impact on the evolution of the universe,” said ISI, “but in mathematically we think they should be fully described by only two numbers. All you need to know about them should come from the big black hole – or what mass is – and how fast it spins. ‘
To verify this theory, the researchers used a unique feature of black hole collisions: “ringing” or vibration – as a struck bell created by the final black hole. “If you have a penis and strike it with a hammer, it will sound,” ISI noted. “The sound step and duration, the sound features say something about what the bell is made of. With black holes happens something similar – they sound gravitational waves.”
This ringing includes information about the structure and space of the black hole around it, added ISI. Although in the past this phenomenon was poorly observed, the GW250114 returned a signal with “two modes … in basic mode and overcrowding”, with much clearer.
“We have found two components of this ring, which allowed us to check that this black hole is actually corresponding to the fact that it is only described by two numbers – mass and rotation,” he said. “And this is very important for our understanding of how space and time work – that these black holes should in some way should be infinitely. This is the first time we can see it so convincingly.”
The theorem of the Hawking surface area
The second forecast confirmed by the GW250114 is the one in 1971. Made by British physicist Stephen Hawking, stating that when two black holes blend in, the surface area of the surface should be equal to or larger than the original black holes.
“It’s a deep but very simple theorem that says that the total area of the black hole surface can never be reduced – it can only increase or remain the same,” ISI said.
Although previous observations of LIMO have provided preliminary confirmations of the theorem, the clarity of this new signal gives researchers unmatched confidence, ISI said.
“Because we can determine the part of the signal that comes from black holes early because they are separated from each other, we can conclude about their areas,” he explained. “Then we can look at the last part of the signal from the final black hole and measure our area.”
Like Cerro’s equation, Hawking’s theorem also uses Einstein’s work as its foundation: “Einstein’s theories are like all this,” Isi explained.
Kip Thorne, one of the three Nobel Prize for Ligo contributions, said Hawking called him as soon as he learned about 2015. The detection of gravitational waves to ask if Ligo will be able to test his theorem. “If Hawking were alive, he would have forgiven to see the area of the connected black holes,” Thorne said in a report of the respected physics who died in 2018.
ISI argued that this sominal, theoretical work, is confirmed decades after the most advanced instruments. He added that by confirming Hawking’s equation, he could have influenced the very sought after physics purpose-to-seem to be unrelated to seemingly incompatible theory of general relativity describing gravity, with quantum mechanics associated with the subatomic world.
Ligo has created a whole new branch of astronomy. This caused a revolution of what we think of compact objects, especially black holes, “he said.” Before the Ligo turned on, people weren’t even sure that black holes could combine, crash and shape this way. “
This chart draws the discoveries created by the Ligo-Virgo-Kagra (LVK) network since the first detection of Ligo in 2015, due to gravitational waves emanating from collided black holes.
Long -awaited stage
Gravity waves are very weak, and Titanic’s task is often described as a needle in a haystack, says Emanuele Berti, a professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, who was not related to the study. He described the Ligo detector as a “hearing aid” that helps this process.
“A large group of scientists have spent the last ten years improving those hearing aid, and now we can” hear “signals clearly,” he said in an email. “Now we can check the basic principles of difficulty that we could not try ten years ago.”
Among these principles, he added, the idea that black holes are the simplest macroscopic objects in the universe. The “ringing” level created by the GW250114 means that scientists can say confidently that the final object corresponds to the black holes predicted by Einstein’s overall relativity, which, according to it, is “extremely interesting”.
Leor Barack, a professor of mathematical physics from the University of Southampton in England, who was also not part of the study, noted that among the more than 300 black holes, the latest of the mergers recorded by LIMO is the latest as “particularly impressive” and calls the long -awaited analysis of the new study. Scientists were able to extract two remnants of the black hole “pure tones” when it established itself in the final form, Barack added.
“It was the first time a clear extraction of the first Overone – a weaker harmonious sound of the ringing hole, in addition to the primary tone,” he said. “Such a test is the most accurate so far, long margins.”
The study is a significant phase of gravitational wave astronomy, said Associate Professor at the Institute of Astrophysics of Macarena Lagos, Universedadad Andrés Bell. Lagos was also not related to work.
She agreed that a second tone detection in a “sounding” black hole is particularly significant, adding that GW250114 shows the success of constant Ligo improvements and shows that gravitational wave detection can try the main physics before.
“Although current severity tests still have great uncertainty, this work provides the basis for the future to detect” even better quality, expected to be expected in the coming years – by email. Lagos said in a letter. “These future observations promise to provide more accurate tests of our understanding of space time and severity.”
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