Black Holes Merged Into A Bigger Bang Than The Big Bang
The signal was of the biggest bang since the Big Bang. Alan Weinstein a physicist, at Caltech mentioned that these readings were the highest ever observed.
These black holes are so densely packed that not even light passes through them. After their recent encounter with the biggest bang, they found out how two normal size holes transfused and made one giant black hole. These holes were categorized as per their sizes. The small ones were called stellar, they were formed when a star is collapsed. As per scientists, they were black holes that were sized million times the size of our sun.
Astronomers were so confused when they received the signal. They assumed that if a star that grew that big, it would have consumed itself. The blast shouldn’t have left any trace.
Nelson Christensen, research director of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, mentioned that star collapses do not create that big of stellar black holes. Mostly they are 70 times the mass of our sun. This information became a contradiction when two detectors caught signals originating from stellar black holes. The signal depicted that one of the black holes was 65 times and another being 85 times the mass of our sun.
The final result was calculated and it came out to be a black hole with 142 times the mass of the sun was formed. Due to the collision, a gigantic amount of energy was released in the form of a gravitational wave. This wave rippled out at the speed of light. These were the waves that were detected by the physicists using LIGO and Virgo detectors around last year. After getting the reading from the signal, they did their research and later published it in Physical Review Letters and Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The detectors that were used allowed them to catch gravitational waves in audio form. So, the signal that was caught was about one-tenth of a second. It was the sound of a thud. Physicists also mentioned that this collision happened around 7 billion years ago. They only caught it now because it happened very far distance.
Scientists were so confused because of previous encounters with the black holes. They were small before the merging and even if they fused, they didn’t pass the size of a stellar black hole.
Avi Loeb from Harvard said that it might work as Legos. It would work like joining small pieces to make bigger objects. After Weinstein and Christensen considered this they thought it made sense. Adding to this Janna Levin, Barnard College astronomer, said how there is a slight chance that from the start both the black holes were created differently. The Holes might have been capturing smaller holes as they passed by.
Even after so many theories, scientists could point a pin in how the merged black holes were floating around space and had grown bigger. The massive black holes might have existed since the Big Bang. Further, Weinstein added that how they are surprised by every new thing they find out in astrophysics.
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