LIGO Detects Most Massive Black Hole Merger to Date (caltech.edu) 28
The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration has detected the most massive black hole merger to date, forming a final black hole around 225 times the Sun's mass. Caltech reports: Before now, the most massive black hole merger -- produced by an event that took place in 2021 called GW190521 -- had a total mass of 140 times that of the Sun. In the more recent GW231123 event, the 225-solar-mass black hole was created by the coalescence of black holes each approximately 100 and 140 times the mass of the Sun. In addition to their high masses, the black holes are also rapidly spinning.
"The black holes appear to be spinning very rapidly -- near the limit allowed by Einstein's theory of general relativity," explains Charlie Hoy of the University of Portsmouth and a member of the LVK. "That makes the signal difficult to model and interpret. It's an excellent case study for pushing forward the development of our theoretical tools." Researchers are continuing to refine their analysis and improve the models used to interpret such extreme events. "It will take years for the community to fully unravel this intricate signal pattern and all its implications," says Gregorio Carullo of the University of Birmingham and a member of the LVK. "Despite the most likely explanation remaining a black hole merger, more complex scenarios could be the key to deciphering its unexpected features. Exciting times ahead!"
"The black holes appear to be spinning very rapidly -- near the limit allowed by Einstein's theory of general relativity," explains Charlie Hoy of the University of Portsmouth and a member of the LVK. "That makes the signal difficult to model and interpret. It's an excellent case study for pushing forward the development of our theoretical tools." Researchers are continuing to refine their analysis and improve the models used to interpret such extreme events. "It will take years for the community to fully unravel this intricate signal pattern and all its implications," says Gregorio Carullo of the University of Birmingham and a member of the LVK. "Despite the most likely explanation remaining a black hole merger, more complex scenarios could be the key to deciphering its unexpected features. Exciting times ahead!"
Uh... I have a bad feeling about this. (Score:1)
What are the chances that one too many of these monsters merge together and just starts gobbling up the entire rest of the universe at an exponentially increasing rate? Has anyone done the math on that yet? Exciting times, indeed.
Re:Uh... I have a bad feeling about this. (Score:5, Informative)
Practically zero... most galaxies already contain a central black hole with millions or sometimes billions of solar masses...
Don't forget that black holes don't "suck" more than a star with the same mass... you can just get closer to the black hole without touching it. At the same distance you get the same gravity.
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Zoom out a small bit, and that 2 blackholes is indistinguishable from one. Now that's just the case up close, too.
The merged black hole sucks less (Score:5, Interesting)
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I didn't mention it as it wasn't really relevant, but +1 Informative.
Re:Uh... I have a bad feeling about this. (Score:4, Funny)
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” Douglas Adams.
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LoL, this. But to be pedantic: Douglas Adams didn't say this. A character in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy said this. Douglas Adams is not responsible for what his characters say -- although he no doubt would agree with this one.
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The characters in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are fictional.
It was in fact Douglas Adams who said this. (Or, more specifically, wrote it.)
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If Douglas Adams wrote the words a character said in one of his novels, then he himself did not say those words, the character did. I can't make it any clearer.
But I'll try. Shakespeare once wrote dialog for one of his characters (in Henry IV Part Two, I think) who said "The first thing we do, let's kill. all the lawyers." Did Shakespeare say that, or the character in the play? The answer is: the latter. The character was a terrorist, and he spoke in the context of overthrowing the government. Shakespeare w
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If Douglas Adams wrote the words a character said in one of his novels, then he himself did not say those words, the character did. I can't make it any clearer.
Every word from every character in every work by Douglas Adams is a word written by Douglas Adams.
I can't make that any clearer. Every single word.
But I'll try. Shakespeare once wrote dialog for one of his characters (in Henry IV Part Two, I think) who said "The first thing we do, let's kill. all the lawyers." Did Shakespeare say that, or the character in the play? The answer is:
William Shakespeare wrote that.
Dick the Butcher doesn't exist, he's a fictional character.
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If Douglas Adams wrote the words a character said in one of his novels, then he himself did not say those words, the character did. I can't make it any clearer.
Every word from every character in every work by Douglas Adams is a word written by Douglas Adams.
I can't make that any clearer. Every single word.
Not. Relevant. Adams wrote the words. That doesn't mean he "said" them in the sense of expressing his own opinion.
But I'll try. Shakespeare once wrote dialog for one of his characters (in Henry IV Part Two, I think) who said "The first thing we do, let's kill. all the lawyers." Did Shakespeare say that, or the character in the play? The answer is:
William Shakespeare wrote that.
Dick the Butcher doesn't exist, he's a fictional character.
See above.
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""The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" is a quote from Shakespeare.
"Call me Ishmael" is a quote from Melville.
"Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration" is a quote from Herbert.
And, “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is" is a quote from Adams.
This is the way quotations work.
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Despite my attempts, it is obvious that you are incapable of recognizing the difference between what someone says and what someone writes as an utterance for a character they created.
If you're going to quote from Douglas Adams A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy then you attribute it to "Douglas Adams, A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
If you're going to quote from plain old Douglas Adams, as in something he said himself as his own opinion, rather than wrote as dialog for a character, then you just attribu
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No, that's the way bibliographic citations work.
The way quotations work is, a quotation is the work of the person who wrote it.
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The mass of a merged blackhole is not larger than its 2 constituents.
In short: That's not how gravity works.
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F = G * (m1 * m2) / r^2
Or as we call it, Newton's inverse square law, where the force of gravity on any two objects is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Space is really really really really really big (the observable universe has a diameter of about 93 billion light-years), so it is literally impossible for any combination of mergers to have any effect beyond an infinitesimal region of the universe. Even a galactic merger which caused two supermassive blackholes to merge wou
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What are the chances that one too many of these monsters merge together and just starts gobbling up the entire rest of the universe at an exponentially increasing rate? Has anyone done the math on that yet? Exciting times, indeed.
Space is bigger than you apparently imagine. It would take a merger of several galactic central black holes to even begin sucking up the local galaxies around it. And the chances of that happening are so infinitesimally small as to be unimaginable even by Hollywood level daydreamers.
There are plenty of real things to worry about when it comes to astrophysics. You can safely tick this one off the list. Perhaps some light reading [astrokatie.com] to give you more possible things to worry about.
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If the galaxies around them were in stable orbits around the barycenter of the merged galaxies, they would continue to be so. If they were not, they were always going to be part of the merger.
"an event that took place in 2021 called GW190521" (Score:4, Informative)
Re:"an event that took place in 2021 called GW1905 (Score:4, Funny)
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It was a Tuesday.
Unlikely.
Far more likely, it was a Friday, and some poor sod of a programmer had been ordered to push code to PROD. The code, of course, was barely tested, and had a number of nasty bugs that were only apparent in the PROD environment because management was too cheap to properly build out a UAT environment for testing. Anyway, they push to PROD, reboot the system and BOOM! What looks like two black holes merging was actually a division by zero in a critical system.
That's my theory, anyway.
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Sometimes people do use this inconsistently, but it is an error.
spinning black holes (Score:3, Interesting)
Since black holes are considered points in space, and a point can't spin, are they still considering spinning black holes (which is essentially all of them) "ringularities"?
And it would seem that angular momentum is likely to increase with each merger, since they're going to tend to orbit each other in the plane of their spinning? And when they merge, that will add to their angular momentum in that plane?
Lastly, I haven't read any discussions regarding "theoretical limits" to how fast a black hole can spin. Would anyone care to elaborate on that? Are we talking about the event horizon dragging approaching the speed of light? I thought there was nothing that said that SPACE can't move faster than c? (or was that the *expansion* of space?) And wouldn't it just be getting closer and closer to c and not ever getting there anyway? (a problem of limits)
Re:spinning black holes (Score:5, Informative)
Since black holes are considered points in space, and a point can't spin, are they still considering spinning black holes (which is essentially all of them) "ringularities"?
It is considered to spin because it is considered to have a very large size, the boundary at which light cannot escape. It’s considered spinning because material that passed the horizon imparted rotational kinetic energy and its large enough to keep dragging space along with it as it rotates. It does in fact have a ring as a central singularity shape, but that’s only from simplistic mathematical perspective and is quite possibly not real.
And it would seem that angular momentum is likely to increase with each merger, since they're going to tend to orbit each other in the plane of their spinning? And when they merge, that will add to their angular momentum in that plane?
Its possible, but yes the angular momentum essentially gets combined. If they are spinning opposite directions it tends to cancel, there is no up or down or preferred direction in space that’s been rigorously established so it’s not like they all face only one way.
Lastly, I haven't read any discussions regarding "theoretical limits" to how fast a black hole can spin. Would anyone care to elaborate on that? Are we talking about the event horizon dragging approaching the speed of light? I thought there was nothing that said that SPACE can't move faster than c? (or was that the *expansion* of space?) And wouldn't it just be getting closer and closer to c and not ever getting there anyway? (a problem of limits)
You add to the energy of the system when you add angular momentum. More energy means more mass equivalence and that means the radius at which light can’t escape expands. It’s a linear relationship too, twice the energy means twice the radius and 8 times the volume. Thats why a barely formed black hole of a few tons or less is about the most dense thing possible in physics while the largest black hole on record is around 400 times less dense than air at sea level.
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lol- what theory is that? Most certainly not the only theory currently used to model them: General Relativity.
Being you've brought Planck into the discussion, you're trying to reconcile with QM. That's historically tricky business. There is no currently non-broken theory that accomplishes this.
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Since black holes are considered points in space,
Well, the singularity at the center of the black hole is a point (or, is a point if the black hole isn't spinning.) The term "black hole" refers to the event horizon and everything inside it. The stuff inside is not observable-- the math says it's a singular point (ignoring quantum mechanics, since there is no theory of quantum gravity), but that's not observable.
and a point can't spin,
Technically, when we say it's spinning, the actual meaning is "the black hole has angular momentum." The word "spin" is just shorthand. Same goes