India helps detect: Biggest black hole crash; signal found, 240 times heavier than sun
Indian scientists - Archana Pai, Koustav Chandra and a team led by M K Haris - played a central role in the landmark discovery of this event, dubbed 'GW231123'.
The discovery was announced on Monday by the global LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) network - an international team of scientists whose mission is to detect tiny ripples in spacetime triggered by powerful cosmic events, such as black hole collisions.
You Can Also Check:
Pune AQI
|
Weather in Pune
|
Bank Holidays in Pune
|
Public Holidays in Pune
LVK comprises three gravitational-wave detectors - LIGO in the United States, Virgo in Italy, and KAGRA in Japan.
GR231123 was discovered by LIGO Hanford in Richmond (Washington) and LIGO Livingston (Los Angeles) on Nov 23, 2023.
The event involved two massive black holes, one measuring 103 times the mass of the Sun and the other, 137 solar masses. The result was a binary black hole the mass of which is 240 times that of the Sun. Furthermore, Pai, principal investigator of the LIGO-India Scientific Collaboration (LISC), said black holes were spinning at a rate six lakh times faster than the earth's rotation.
by Taboola
by Taboola
Sponsored Links
Sponsored Links
Promoted Links
Promoted Links
You May Like
Is it legal? How to get Internet without paying a subscription?
Techno Mag
Learn More
Undo
"GW231123 is the heaviest and highly spinning binary black hole system detected to date," she said.
Black holes this large and fast-spinning aren't supposed to exist - at least not according to our current understanding of how stars evolve.
Chandra, who completed his PhD at IIT Bombay and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Pennsylvania State University, helped study and make sense of the GW231123 signal, wrote up the findings, and figured out what the final part of the signal tells us after the black holes merged.
He also helped write the main scientific paper. Haris and his team from IIT Calicut checked if the signal behaved exactly as Einstein's theory of gravity predicted - and so far, it seems to match.
"This signal, just a tenth of a second long, was a real puzzle at first," Chandra said. It matched the waveform of emerging black holes, as predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity.
"We realised that we may have, for the first time, witnessed the collision of two intermediate-mass black holes.
Chandra said it could be years before scientists are able to uncover the true origin of the gravitational wave and extracting all data from it.
India participates in global gravitational wave astronomy via LISC, which currently comprises 17 academic institutions across India. IIT Bombay specialises in short-duration transient searches, including intermediate-mass black holes in the LIGO-Virgo data.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time of India
30 minutes ago
- Time of India
NASA and IBM Introduce Groundbreaking Surya AI Model for Space Weather Forecasting
The Critical Need for Solar Storm Protection Live Events Open-Source Innovation and Global Impact Leadership Vision and Future Applications Conclusion: A New Era of Preparedness Our contemporary civilization is unusually susceptible to solar activity. Solar storms present serious threats to our technology-oriented society, as intense solar occurrences recharge Earth's ionosphere and lead to extensive GPS distortions or full signal loss to satellite communications. The economic stakes are astronomical. Experts estimate that defending the infrastructure of value $2.4 trillion hinges on precise space weather mass ejection-induced geomagnetically induced currents can overload transformers and initiate large-scale power grid outages, whereas commercial aviation experiences compromised radio communications and augmented radiation exposure at high altitudes. For human missions to the Moon and Mars, accurate solar storm forecasts would be a matter of life and death since astronauts require early warning to take shelter from high levels of radiation during solar particle increasing fleet of low Earth orbit satellites, such as those providing global internet services, is uniquely at risk. Solar activity excites Earth's upper atmosphere, heating it and pumping additional drag into the satellites, slowing them down, detaching them from orbit, and leading to early strength is its model architecture built on top of a foundation model, which is learned directly from uncooked solar data. Surya is distinct from other AI systems that need extensive human labeling. Surya can learn new tasks and applications very quickly. The model has exceptional capabilities in active region tracking, flare activity forecasting, solar wind speed prediction, and multiple observatory data success of the model is based directly on the long-term database of the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Since its launch in 2010, NASA 's Solar Dynamics Observatory has given an unbroken, high-resolution record of the Sun for almost 15 years by capturing images every 12 seconds across multiple wavelengths and accurate magnetic field measurements. The unprecedented dataset covering a full solar cycle allows the AI to identify faint patterns too small to be visible to shorter periods of findings indicate Surya achieving significant advancements in solar flare prediction, with its capacity for the production of graphical forecasts of solar flares two hours ahead. The early findings exceed current standards by 16%, a great leap in one of the most difficult issues heliophysics has been grappling a step that may speed up space weather research globally, NASA invites the science and applications community to try out and investigate this AI model by granting open access to the model on HuggingFace and the code on GitHub. This opens up advanced AI tools to everyone to enable researchers, educators, and inventors worldwide to expand upon Surya's training was partially funded by the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot, an initiative led by the National Science Foundation that gives researchers access to high-performance computing, data sets, and AI software, leveraging federal and industry resources, including computing power from NVIDIA."We're pushing data-driven science forward by infusing NASA's rich scientific knowledge into state-of-the-art AI models," said NASA Headquarters' chief science data officer Kevin Murphy in a press release by the US space agency. "By creating a foundation model that's been trained on NASA's heliophysics data, we're simplifying the analysis of the Sun's complexity with unprecedented speed and accuracy."Joseph Westlake, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters, underscored the larger significance: "Our society is founded on technologies that are very vulnerable to space weather. Just as we utilize meteorology to predict the weather of the Earth, space weather forecasts predict the conditions and phenomena in the space environment that can impact Earth and our created solely for solar research, Surya's architecture and approach are flexible across the scientific discipline, from planetary science to Earth observation, establishing groundwork infrastructure for parallel AI projects across a range of launch of Surya is a landmark in the field of space weather forecasting, as it kick-starts an era of AI-based mechanisms to safeguard our ever-more fragile technological civilization. With society increasingly reliant on satellites, GPS technology, and networked infrastructure, Surya's 16% gains over current methods establish it as a foundation tool for the protection of modern civilization from solar partnership between IBM, NASA, and the global scientific community shows the potential of public-private partnerships to speed up breakthrough scientific advancements. Making Surya open source shows a willingness to further global knowledge instead of preserving proprietary benefits, opening up this breakthrough technology for use all over the the future, Surya's foundation model design serves as a blueprint for applications of AI in many areas of science. As scientists around the globe investigate and expand on its capabilities, we can anticipate increasingly advanced space weather forecasting tools to be developed, eventually leading to a hardened technological infrastructure that is better equipped to survive the Sun's most intense eruptions. In a day and age where a single large-scale solar storm can inflict trillions of dollars in damage, Surya is humanity's best early warning system against one of the natural world's most potent forces.
&w=3840&q=100)
Business Standard
34 minutes ago
- Business Standard
Very soon, someone from our own soil will go to space in our rocket: Shukla
Excited after a successful mission to the International Space Station (ISS), Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla on Thursday hoped someone would very soon travel to space 'from our own capsule, from our rocket, from our soil'. Addressing a press conference here, Group Captain Shukla said the first-hand experience from the ISS mission was invaluable and a lot better than any training. He also said India looks saare jahaan se achcha (better than the entire world) even today — words first used by Indian astronaut Rakesh Sharma after his space mission in 1984. On his Axiom-4 Mission, Shukla said the experience from the ISS mission would be very useful for India's own Gaganyaan mission, and he learnt a lot in the past year as part of his mission. 'No matter how much training you have done, even after that, when you sit in the rocket and the engines ignite, when they catch fire, I think it is a very different feeling.' 'I had not imagined how it would feel, and I was actually running behind the rocket for the first few seconds, and it took me some time to catch up to it. From that moment until the time we splashed down, the experience was unbelievable. It was so exciting and so amazing that I have really been struggling to find words to convey it to you, so that you can live that experience through my words,' he said. At the press conference, Union Minister Jitendra Singh said the Department of Space has been around for nearly 70 years, and officially, the Isro was established in 1969. '.... why all this had to happen only in the last few years, why it couldn't have happened in the last five, six decades. We have started following the strategies which are followed by the rest of the world. Now, our benchmarks are global benchmarks, our strategies are global, and the parameters that we are seeking to live up to are global,' he said. Group Captain Prasanth B Nair, who is part of India's Gaganyaan crew, said, 'A few months from now, we are going to have Diwali. That is the time when Ram ji entered Ayodhya. Over here right now, if I can call myself Lakshman... even though I am older than 'Shuks' (Shukla), I would love to be Lakshman to this Ram any day.' 'But let's remember Ram and Lakshman got a lot of help from the entire 'vanar sena', that is our fantastic ISRO team... otherwise it would not have been possible,' he said. Shukla thanked the government, Isro and everyone else who worked hard to successfully execute the mission. 'I would also like to thank everyone who helped bring this mission to the population of our country, making it accessible for everyone to view. In the end, I would like to thank each and every citizen of this country who behaved in a way that made it feel like they actually owned this mission. I truly felt that this was a mission for the entire nation,' he said.
The Hindu
34 minutes ago
- The Hindu
SpaceX took oxygen leak before Axiom-4 launch ‘lightly': ISRO Chairman
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman, V. Narayanan, on Thursday (August 21, 2025), said the Falcon 9 rocket team that launched Indian astronaut Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla to the International Space Station (ISS) took the pre-launch leak in the oxidiser line to one of the engines 'lightly'. He said that had it not been for the ISRO's insistence on a full-fledged test, the leak could have caused a 'catastrophic failure' of the Axiom-4 mission that successfully ferried four astronauts to the ISS and brought them back. The mission was aboard the SpaceX-owned Falcon 9 rocket, which has a track record of successful missions to the ISS. It was the first time in 40 years that an Indian made it to space. Costing India nearly ₹548 crore, the mission is believed to provide valuable information for ISRO's upcoming manned flight missions such as Gaganyaan, scheduled for mid-2027. The Axiom-4 mission was supposed to be launched on June 11, after the fourth rescheduling, but that was postponed when a liquid oxygen leak was discovered during an engine test in the lead-up to the lift-off. The decision to postpone, it emerges, was controversial as there appeared to be differences between the Falcon-9 team and ISRO on whether the leak was serious enough to postpone the mission. Two months after the rocket lifted off on June 25, and which has successfully returned, Mr. Narayanan disclosed interactions between the Falcon team and ISRO that suggest that the Falcon team was not upfront with sharing data from the engine test results, nor could it satisfy the ISRO probing on details of the leak. 'I think they assumed that this was a minor leak because it wasn't their 'leak' sensor but an oxygen sensor that had picked up (the leak). We learnt of this from the press (a press conference by SpaceX the previous day) and when we asked them the location of the leak, they said they couldn't find it. This was shocking to us. Then we asked them for the rate at which oxygen was leaking out; they said this couldn't be shared as it was 'confidential' data. 'We asked them nearly 14 questions; only two were answered,' said Mr. Narayanan. 'ISRO has 40 years of experience with liquid engines, and we know that if there is a block somewhere, it can be rectified, but if the source of a leak is due to a crack, it cannot be allowed. We insisted on a 'complete correction' and they had to call off the launch on June 10, 5.15 p.m. Following this, the (Space-X) management directed the Falcon team to find the location of the leak. It turned out to be a crack in the fuel line. During the tests, it emerged that the crack was widening; we have the data. If the rocket were to lift off with such a crack, the ensuing vibrations will cause it to give way. That will only result in a catastrophic situation... They probably took this a little lightly,' he added. The following day (June 12), the leak was repaired and tests were carried out to ISRO's satisfaction. Subsequent leaks were detected in the Russian service module of the ISS, which led to further launch delays until June 25 when Mr. Shukla and his companions finally lifted off. Captain Shukla, in response to queries at the press conference, on whether Mr. Narayanan 'had saved his life' by insisting on fixing the leak said, 'Everyone who does human space flight missions are very responsible. There were multiple postponements, and this wasn't the only reason. It helped that we had technical expertise from the ISRO and these discussions happened. Ultimately this is what builds trust. ISRO, NASA and Space X have always been transparent and have had regular briefings on emerging issues.'
