Two Giant Black Holes Colliding Sent Ripples Through Space (usatoday.com) 24
"In a galaxy far, far away, two giant black holes appear to be circling each other like fighters in a galactic boxing ring," reports USA Today.
"Gravity is causing this death spiral, which will result in a collision and formation of a single black hole, a massive event that will send ripples through space and time." The collision itself happened eons ago — the two black holes are located about 9 billion light years from Earth. Scientists won't be able to document it for 10,000 years. Even so, there are imperceptible gravitational waves generated before the collision that are hitting us right now. These waves from the black holes' activity will increase, but will not affect Earth. However, they could help increase our understanding of how our universe has evolved.
Such supermassive black holes "are the most powerful and energetic objects in the universe and they have an enormous effect on the evolution of galaxies and stars," Tony Readhead, an astronomy professor at the California Institute of Technology, told USA TODAY. He is the co-author of the report by Caltech astronomers who detail the discovery in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a peer-reviewed scientific journal. "If we want to understand the evolution of our universe we need to understand these objects," Readhead said....
Each of the black holes identified in this study has a mass amounting to hundreds of millions of times more than that of our sun, the researchers say. It took about 100 million years for the two objects to converge on their orbit, which has them at a distance of about 50 times that separating our sun and Pluto, NASA said. The two black holes are more than 99% of the way toward colliding, the agency said....
This is only the second pair of orbiting black holes identified by scientists, the researchers say. Space-time undulations from gravitational waves made by two colliding black holes 1.3 billion light-years away were recorded in 2015 by the National Science Foundation's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.
"Gravity is causing this death spiral, which will result in a collision and formation of a single black hole, a massive event that will send ripples through space and time." The collision itself happened eons ago — the two black holes are located about 9 billion light years from Earth. Scientists won't be able to document it for 10,000 years. Even so, there are imperceptible gravitational waves generated before the collision that are hitting us right now. These waves from the black holes' activity will increase, but will not affect Earth. However, they could help increase our understanding of how our universe has evolved.
Such supermassive black holes "are the most powerful and energetic objects in the universe and they have an enormous effect on the evolution of galaxies and stars," Tony Readhead, an astronomy professor at the California Institute of Technology, told USA TODAY. He is the co-author of the report by Caltech astronomers who detail the discovery in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a peer-reviewed scientific journal. "If we want to understand the evolution of our universe we need to understand these objects," Readhead said....
Each of the black holes identified in this study has a mass amounting to hundreds of millions of times more than that of our sun, the researchers say. It took about 100 million years for the two objects to converge on their orbit, which has them at a distance of about 50 times that separating our sun and Pluto, NASA said. The two black holes are more than 99% of the way toward colliding, the agency said....
This is only the second pair of orbiting black holes identified by scientists, the researchers say. Space-time undulations from gravitational waves made by two colliding black holes 1.3 billion light-years away were recorded in 2015 by the National Science Foundation's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.
two giant black holes colliding (Score:2)
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Slashdot, also a kindergarten for adults that never managed to grow up.
won't be able to document it for 10,000 years (Score:2)
Government funding for better gravity wave detectors will be postponed to FY9960
Meanwhile funding for military procurement will be increased
Stop me if this doesn't make sense. (Score:2)
If the volume of all singularities is zero then the density (mass per volume of space) of all singularities must be infinite (divide by zero?). Since all black holes are clearly not identical, they must have variable densities, which in turn requires a nonzero volume.
Put another way: I can (theore
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I'll take "Singularity vs the Event Horizon" for 200, Alex.
Re: Stop me if this doesn't make sense. (Score:2)
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Why can't I use it to destroy Vulcan?
Because it still has the mass of a pea. And the gravity of a pea.
Re: Stop me if this doesn't make sense. (Score:2)
Re: Stop me if this doesn't make sense. (Score:2)
So that's why Putin stood up suddenly during that meeting, froze for 3 seconds, then sat down again
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Postulated - by the MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) people, amongst others. It's one of the more respectable challenges to the "Standard Model" of cosmology, but it still doesn't attract much interest (at least, from professional cosmologists) compared to the Standard Model.
The last time I counted, it was running one or two publications a month on ArXiv, compared to several dozen a day in mainstream cosmologies.
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This.
And at distances outside of the radius of a pea, it's gravitational effects would be indistinguishable from those of a pea.
Re: Stop me if this doesn't make sense. (Score:1)
Earth has no Schwarzchild Radius (Score:2)
So, for ANY object there is some distance such that the gravitational pull would prevent light from escaping
No, not for any object, for any mass. The Earth's density and mass mean it has no Schwarzschild radius because at no point anywhere is the escape velocity anywhere close to the speed of light. It's not that the structure prevents you from seeing it, it is that it prevents it from existing.
As the mass of an object goes up the density required for that matter to form a Schwarzschild radius and become a Black Hole decreases. Around the mass of a large galaxy, it's the same density as water.
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You are talking about mathematical singularities. The singularities of physics are mathematical singularities, i.e., where the mathematics describing the physical situation breaks down, not the actual physical situation itself. No one knows what happens behind the Schwarzschild radius. So you can theoretically compress to your hearts desire, you still cannot meaningfully say what happens.
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Hawking Radiation (Score:3)
I can (theoretically) compress a pea enough to form a singularity. It'll have infinite density in a zero-volume space, just like any other singularity.
True, but you'll only have it for the tiniest fraction of a second before it immediately decays through Hawking radiation so it will have no time to absorb matter and grow. The smaller the Black Hole the faster it decays. Stellar-sized BHs are probably the longest living things in the universe which are not technically stable but the smaller they are the more rapidly they lose energy and decay.
This is why the potential of BHs being created at the LHC was never a danger - they would have decayed extremel
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If the volume of all singularities is zero
Is it though?
How do you measure volume, if your ruler is being sucked inwards faster than the speed of light? How do you measure where the mass is if its world line ended at the singularity years ago?
What about other models for the internals of a black hole, which attempt to unify quantum mechanics? Does the world line actually form a loop at the event horizon?
We know that our understanding of the physics inside a black hole is probably wrong. Because it doesn't explain how quantum information is absorbed,
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Yes, you could shrink a pea to something like a primordial black hole. It will still only weigh 1 gram and have a tiny event horizon and still only have the gravitational field of a 1g pea. It would attract mass that was very close and wou
1000x smaller than the nucleus of an atom (Score:2)
The gravitational waves recorded earlier were "a thousand times smaller than the nucleus of an atom" !
And this one is so much more distant.
So no military applications I guess ?
year 9999 (Score:2)
If in doubt, RTFP ; galaxy growth. (Score:2)
The first thing that is more informative than (whatever the bit of journalism cited was) is the title : "The Unanticipated Phenomenology of the Blazar PKS 2131â"021: A Unique Supermassive Black Hole Binary Candidate" Blazars are a class of "active galaxy" which are generally quiet, then "blaze up" (hence the name) for short periods, varying rapidly in radio, IR or optical bands. The rapid variation means the source regi