Scientists detect most massive black hole merger ever — and it birthed a monster 225 times as massive as the sun
Scientists have detected the biggest black hole merger ever known — a gigantic collision from two massive space-time ruptures spiraling into each other — and it could hold evidence of the most elusive type of black hole in the universe.
The merger, which happened on the outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy, produced a black hole roughly 225 times more massive than the sun.
That's nearly double the previous record holder, which spawned a final black hole with a mass of around 142 suns. The new collision was found by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration, a group of four detectors that identify cataclysmic cosmic events from the gravitational waves that spill out in their wakes. Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time, first predicted to exist by Albert Einstein and confirmed by LIGO in 2015. For their groundbreaking discovery, physicists involved with the research earned a Nobel Prize in 2017.
But most intriguing to the scientists are the two black holes' masses: approximately 100 and 140 times that of the sun. As was the case with the previous detection, black holes of these sizes fall into a "mass gap" that challenge conventional wisdom on how the space-time ruptures form. The researchers will present their findings July 14 to 18 at the 24th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation (GR24) and the 16th Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves in Glasgow, Scotland.
"We expect most black holes to form when stars die — if the star is massive enough, it collapses to a black hole," Mark Hannam, a physics professor at Cardiff University in Wales and a member of the LVK Collaboration, told Live Science. "But for really massive stars, our theories say that the collapse is unstable, and most of the mass is blasted away in supernova explosions, and a black hole cannot form."
"We don't expect black holes to form between about 60 and 130 times the mass of the sun," he added. "In this observation, the black holes appear to lie in that mass range."
Related: Europe approves LISA, a next-generation space mission that will discover the faintest ripples in space-time
Black holes are born from the collapse of giant stars and grow by gorging on gas, dust, stars and other black holes. Currently, known black holes fall into two categories: stellar-mass black holes, which range from a few to a few dozen times the sun's mass; and supermassive black holes, which can be anywhere from about 100,000 to 50 billion times as massive as the sun.
Yet those that fall into the gap of these two mass ranges, known as intermediate-mass black holes, are physically unable to form from direct star collapses and thus remain incredibly rare. Hints of their existence have nonetheless been found, leading astrophysicists to postulate that these black holes grow from merging with others that are similar in size.
Evidence for this merger arrived on Nov. 23, 2023, when two minuscule distortions in space-time passed through the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory's (LIGO) detectors in Louisiana and Washington. The two detectors — each with two L-shaped 2.5-mile-long (4 kilometers) arms containing two identical laser beams — are designed so that if a gravitational wave passes through Earth, the laser light in one arm of the detector will get compressed while the other expands, creating a tiny change in relative path lengths of the beams.
The signal that arrived at the detectors was complex, coming from two high-mass black holes that were spinning rapidly. Astronomers typically analyze black hole mergers by modeling signals from different types of black hole binary systems, before matching them to any new signal they see.
But for this technique to work, the models have to be precise, and Einstein's equations are harder to solve (and therefore less accurate) when the black holes are spinning quickly.
Related stories
—To hunt gravitational waves, scientists had to create the quietest spot on Earth
—One of the world's largest lasers could be used to detect alien warp drives
—Physicists want to use gravitational waves to 'see' the beginning of time
"The black holes in GW231123 appear to be highly spinning, and our different models give different results," Hannam said. "That means that although we're sure that the black holes are very massive, we don't measure the masses especially accurately. For example, the possible masses for the smaller black hole span the entire mass gap."
For scientists to get better calculations of these masses, these models will have to be refined, which will likely require more observations of similar high-spin mergers.
Such detections would be likely; the LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA gravitational wave detectors have spotted 300 mergers since the start of the first run in 2015, with 200 being found in the fourth run alone. Yet LIGO, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, is facing Trump administration budget cuts that could shut down one detector, making current detections "near-impossible," according to the facility's director, David Reitze.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Gizmodo
25 minutes ago
- Gizmodo
Astronomers Discover the Earliest Black Hole Ever Confirmed
An international team of astronomers has identified the earliest black hole ever confirmed, an ancient behemoth that existed just 500 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery could offer new clues to a mysterious class of ancient galaxies that confounded prevailing theories of cosmology. In a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the researchers describe CAPERS-LRD-z9—a distant, gas-enshrouded galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its center. It dates back some 13.3 billion years, a point when the universe was just 3% of its current age. Spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope, CAPERS-LRD-z9 is one of many 'little red dot' galaxies—these strange bodies began popping up in Webb imagery within the first year of the telescope's mission. 'The discovery of Little Red Dots was a major surprise from early JWST data, as they looked nothing like galaxies seen with the Hubble Space Telescope,' Steven Finkelstein, co-author of the new study and director of the Cosmic Frontier Center at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a press release. 'Now, we're in the process of figuring out what they're like and how they came to be.' Little red dot galaxies are named for their scarlet pinprick appearance in Webb's images, and no telescope prior to Webb has had the sensitivity or resolution to detect such distant objects—hence why no one had seen them before. Their discovery threw consensus ideas about our universe into question: If these objects were stars, their strong light emissions would imply that some galaxies had grown so big and so fast that prevailing theory couldn't account for them, according to NASA. Finkelstein and his colleagues compiled one of the largest samples of litte red dot galaxies to date, nearly all of which existed during the first 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. That study, published in January, found a significant number of these objects likely contained growing supermassive black holes. The finding offered an alternative explanation for how much light the galaxies emit, but they needed more evidence to support their theory. So Finkelstein and a team led by Anthony Taylor, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cosmic Frontier Center who also worked on the research published in January, sifted through spectroscopy data from Webb's CAPERS (CANDELS-Area Prism Epoch of Reionization Survey) program. Spectroscopy measures different wavelengths of light to reveal details about an object's characteristics. When black holes interact with surrounding gas clouds, it produces a distinct spectroscopic signature: As gas rapidly swirls around and falls into a black hole, light from gas that is moving away from us stretches into redder wavelengths, while light from gas that is moving toward us compresses into bluer wavelengths. 'There aren't many other things that create this signature,' Taylor said, and CAPERS-LRD-z9 has it. The discovery marks the first time astronomers have found this spectroscopic signature associated with a little red dot galaxy, according to the team, indicating that supermassive black holes are the likely source of their unexplained brightness. The work could also help explain what makes these galaxies so red: If light is passing through a thick cloud of gas around a supermassive blackhole, it would stretch into redder wavelengths. 'We've seen these clouds in other galaxies,' Taylor said. 'When we compared this object to those other sources, it was a dead ringer.' The discovery could also offer fresh insights into black hole evolution. Taylor and his colleagues estimate that the black hole at the center of this galaxy is enormous—up to 300 million times more massive than the Sun. Finding a black hole of this size that existed so early on in the universe 'adds to growing evidence that early black holes grew much faster than we thought possible,' Finkelstein said. 'Or they started out far more massive than our models predict.'
Yahoo
29 minutes ago
- Yahoo
A Scientist's Plan to Visit a Black Hole in 100 Years Is Wild. It Might Also Work.
Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: It may be possible for a swarm of ultralight nanocrafts—propelled by a laser and traveling at a third of the speed of light—to make it to a black hole within about a century. For a spacecraft like that to reach a black hole in such a relatively short time, there would have to be a black hole 20-25 light-years from Earth, and none so close have been observed yet. Observing a black hole so close could answer questions that might warp the rules of physics. On April 10, 2019, a black hole broke the internet. The first-ever image of a black hole—starring the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87—was published by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). In an equally impressive follow-up, our own galaxy's supermassive black hole (Sagittarius A*, sometimes shortened to Sag A*) would be imaged by EHT three years later. So, we can finally see these things. What we can't yet do is send a spacecraft to one. But astrophysicist Cosimo Bambi (from Fudan University in China) has a vision. He sees a visit to a black hole happening within the next century—if we can develop a spacecraft light enough to be shot through space by a laser beam, that is. While Sag A* is a staggering 26,000 light-years from Earth, and Gaia-BH1 (the closest known stellar-mass black hole) is 1,560 light-years away, they may not be our only visitation options. Bambi thinks there could possibly be a smaller black hole hiding as close as 20 to 25 light-years away. He may be (approximately) right. While 20 light-years may be something of a stretch, in 2023, a team of researchers from the University of Padua in Italy and the University of Barcelona in Spain found that there could be stellar-mass black holes as close to Earth as 150 light-years away. These alleged black holes are thought to exist in the Hyades open cluster—a horde of stars, close in age and chemical composition, held loosely together by their gravitational pull. When the team ran simulations that were supposed to end up matching the mass and size of the cluster, the only way they could reach those numbers was by including black holes. Whether these black holes actually exist, however, remains to be proven. They will be exceedingly difficult for telescopes to observe because, as their name implies, black holes emit no light. And stellar-mass black holes lack the massive accretion disks that made it possible to image the M87 black hole and Sag A*. On top of that, even if—as Bambi suggests in a study soon to be published in the journal iScience—the closest black holes are slightly further from us than 20-25 light years away, and hypothetically could be reached by a spacecraft traveling at the speed of light over a century and a half, there is still the issue of creating a spacecraft light and fast enough to trek over there. The proposal? Micro-spacecraft with light sails. These have been proposed as a way to observe distant objects up close before—the Breakthrough Starshot initiative is looking to send a swarm of nanocrafts to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri. And those nanocrafts are similar to what Bambi is considering. No heavier than a paperclip, these tiny space probes with microchips on board will be attached to light sails propelled by a ground-based laser. Breakthrough Starshot is aiming for speeds of up to 100 million miles an hour (a third of the speed of light), and Bambi is pushing for about the same. Spacecraft traveling at a third of the speed of light would only take 70 years to reach a black hole 20 to 25 light-years away (and data beamed back from the mission will take another two decades to reach us). If there are none that close, their next port of call would be the Hyades cluster—a journey that would take at least 420 years. Now, none of this can be done before the technology is actually developed. But Bambi thinks that the lower costs and technological advancements needed for a nanocraft swarm may actually evolve within 30 years. 'It may sound really crazy, and in a sense closer to science fiction,' he said in a recent press release. 'But people said we'd never detect gravitational waves because they're too weak. We did—100 years later. People thought we'd never observe the shadows of black holes. 'Now, 50 years later, we have images of two.' You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life? Solve the daily Crossword
Gizmodo
an hour ago
- Gizmodo
Daring New Plan Lays Out Mission to a Black Hole
Fifty-six years after Disney filmmakers imagined what it would be like for a spacecraft crew to journey to a black hole in the 1979 movie The Black Hole, an astrophysicist has released a plan for a real interstellar mission to go where no spacecraft has gone before. Outlined in a new paper published today in iScience, the proposal is a two-pronged, surprisingly simple approach. First, scientists need to find a black hole that's relatively nearby. Second, they need to build something called a nanocraft—a tiny probe that runs on a microchip—sturdy enough to withstand the journey. With the appropriate technological advances, it could be doable within a few decades, Cosimo Bambi, the paper's author and a theoretical physicist at Fudan University in China, told Gizmodo. The idea is 'very speculative and extremely challenging,' the paper states, although 'not completely unrealistic.' In addition to the proposal, Bambi presents a potential trajectory for the spacecraft, as well as an outline of what scientific experiments it could perform and how it might work. Searching for a nearby black hole isn't a new concept for astrophysicists by any means. If anything, scientists have been getting better at it every year. And nanocrafts have also previously been touted as a next-generation spacecraft for exploring exoplanets—some initiatives have in the past received backing from major thought leaders in this space, including Stephen Hawking. Still, even if scientists managed to figure out the details, the mission could take up to 100 years, depending on where the target black hole is located. That's nothing in the general timescale of breakthroughs in astrophysics, Bambi said. Gravitational waves, for instance, took more than a century to confirm after they were first predicted. 'This is not something we can do tomorrow,' Bambi said, adding that his approach could be proven wrong. But assuming scientists will want to directly probe a black hole someday—a long-standing goal of astrophysics—the discussions around how to do it need to start somewhere, he said. 'The proposed mission is indeed challenging, but not entirely impossible,' said Honghui Liu, an astrophysicist at the University of Tuebingen in Germany who was not involved with the work, in an email to Gizmodo. Liuechoes Bambi's argument that the proposal may be valuable in the future: 'Sometimes we need to think boldly and do the calculations,' Liu said. If—and this is a supermassive if—scientists are ever able to send a probe to a black hole, it would revolutionize our understanding of the universe. For example, scientists have long suspected that the extreme conditions around a black hole could reveal new information that contradicts general relativity, but current observation techniques make it hard to directly characterize the physical conditions of spacetime near a black hole. 'Currently, such tests are only possible in weak gravity regimes, such as within the solar system,' Liu explained. Having a highly sensitive probe that can send signals back to Earth could offer much-desired 'clean' data around a black hole, according to both Liu and Bambi. That is, if it can survive the gravitational pull of these objects, and not get ripped apart or eaten like every other piece of matter that comes too close…
