The collision of two black holes produced a gravitational wave signal unlike any other heard before.
Category: cosmology – Page 395
Gravitational waves reveal unprecedented collision of heavy and light black holes
Researchers with the world’s gravitational wave detectors said today they had picked up vibrations from a cosmic collision that harmonized with the opening notes of an Elvis Presley hit. The source was the most exotic merger of two black holes detected yet—a pair in which one weighed more than three times as much as the other. Because of the stark mass imbalance, the collision generated gravitational waves at multiple frequencies, in a harmony Elvis fans would recognize. The chord also confirms a prediction of Einstein’s theory of gravity, or general relativity.
Such mismatched mass events could help theorists figure out how pairs of black holes form in the first place. “Anything that seems to be at the edge of our predictions is most interesting,” says Chris Belczynski, a gravitational theorist at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, who was not involved in the observation. But the one event is “not quite in the regime where you can tell the different formation [routes] apart.”
Physicists first detected gravitational waves in 2015, when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a pair of detectors in Washington and Louisiana, spotted two black holes spiraling into each other, generating infinitesimal ripples in spacetime. Two years later, the Virgo detector near Pisa, Italy, joined the hunt, and by August 2017, the detectors had bagged a total of 10 black hole mergers.
Why the Big Bang Produced Something Rather Than Nothing
How did matter gain the edge over antimatter in the early universe? Maybe, just maybe, neutrinos.
The Super-Kamiokande Neutrino Observatory, located more than 3,000 feet below Mount Ikeno near the city of Hida, Japan. Credit… Kamioka Observatory, Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo.
Behold the “Quasar Tsunami,” Which Can Kill an Entire Galaxy
O,.o possible higgs field containment device could stop the rupture and other ways to destroy the root of the problem too.
New data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope details what may be the most powerful phenomena in the universe: the “quasar tsunami,” a cosmic storm of such terrifying proportions that it can tear apart an entire galaxy.
“No other phenomena carries more mechanical energy,” said principal investigator Nahum Arav of Virginia Tech in a statement. “The winds are pushing hundreds of solar masses of material each year. The amount of mechanical energy that these outflows carry is up to several hundreds of times higher than the luminosity of the entire Milky Way galaxy.”
Black Hole Death
Arav and colleagues described the devastating phenomena in a series of six papers published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplements.
Major new breakthrough could help reveal the origin of the universe, scientists say
Scientists have made a major breakthrough that could help us understand the origin of our universe, they say.
Researchers have discovered hints of a difference between the behaviour of neutronos and antineutrinos. That, in turn, could help demonstrate why there is so much matter relative to antimatter in the universe – and, in turn, how everything that surrounds us came to be.
Research identifies detection constraints for dark photons
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Past cosmological and astrophysical observations suggest that over one quarter of the universe’s energy density is made up of a non-conventional type of matter known as dark matter. This type of matter is believed to be composed of particles that do not absorb, emit or reflect light, and thus cannot be observed directly using conventional detection methods.
Researchers worldwide have carried out studies aimed at detecting dark matter in the universe, yet so far, none of them has been successful. Even the preferred candidate for dark matter, weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), have not yet been observed experimentally.
The China Dark Matter Experiment (CDEX) collaboration, a large team of researchers at Tsinghua University and other universities in China, has recently conducted a search for a different possible dark matter candidate known as the dark photon. While the search was unsuccessful, their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, identifies new constraints on a dark photon parameter that could inform future studies.