Latest news with #LaserInterferometerGravitational-WaveObservatory
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists record a black hole collision they weren't sure was possible
A pair of newly-discovered record-breaking black holes has scientists simultaneously popping the champagne and scratching their heads. The massive duo are the largest ever recorded at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which was built to detect ripples in the fabric of spacetime caused by the collisions of massive objects. These enormous outliers are challenging theorists to figure out just how they grew to such titanic sizes. 'We don't think black holes form between about 60 and 130 times the mass of the sun, and these two seem to be pretty much slap bang in the middle of that range,' says Mark Hannam, a physicist at Cardiff University in the UK and a LIGO team member. Your normal everyday black hole is thought to be born during the death of a giant star, when the star's weighty core collapses down into an infinitesimal point with such strong gravity that nothing, not even light, can escape it. But the physics of this process gets wonky for especially huge stars. Once their cores weight more than around 60 solar masses, the collapse becomes so violent that the entire star is blown to smithereens, leaving nothing, not even a black hole, behind. Yet LIGO is now spotting more and more black holes within this 'forbidden' zone, including the newest behemoths. They are thought to be 103 and 137 times the sun's mass, according to a paper posted July 13 to but each has enough uncertainty in their measured properties that they could both be inside the prohibited range. When they met and merged out in the deep dark universe billions of years ago, they created an even larger monster tipping the scales at between 190 and 265 solar masses, the most massive beast LIGO has ever seen. As the observatory captures gravitational waves from more such events, researchers will be able to tease apart the mystery of their creation and perhaps learn whether they have a connection to the astoundingly huge black holes lurking in the centers of galaxies. Black holes were thought to come in two flavors. This discovery is a strange third For a long time, black holes were known to come in just two versions—approximately sun-sized and galactic. Most of the roughly 300 black holes LIGO has detected so far fit into the first category: They are between a few and several tens of times the sun's mass and are believed to have formed after a gargantuan star exploded as a supernova, leaving behind a dense remnant that inexorably sucks in anything that gets too close. The second version is a much more gargantuan beast. Telescopes have spotted black holes in the centers of nearly every galaxy; gravitational monstrosities weighing 100 million solar masses or more that appear to regulate star formation within these galaxies. Nobody is quite sure how these immense devourers got so big. Did they start out as sun-scale black holes and then somehow grow to extreme size? Or was there another story behind their creation? The existence of black holes in the intermediate range—somewhere between 100 and 100,000 times the sun's mass—would help bridge this gap and perhaps help explain whether small black holes were turning into larger ones. But, until recently, physicists had never seen one. To great fanfare in 2020, LIGO researchers announced that they'd found a black hole duo with masses 66 and 85 times that of the sun, whose smash-up produced a giant with around 150 solar masses. The finding for the first time showed that black holes could cross into this threshold of intermediate mass, though theorists are still debating exactly how that happened. The problem is that when a gigantic star has a core that weights between 60 and 130 times the sun's mass, it can reach blazing temperatures nearing 300 million degrees Celsius during the end of its life. At that point, particles of light spontaneously transform into electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons. These particles can no longer hold up the star's heavy outer layers, which come crashing down with such ferocity that the core is completely obliterated. No black hole, or anything else, results. Physicists have speculated about a few possibilities to explain what they're seeing with LIGO. For one, their theories of stellar evolution might be wrong and perhaps something can survive the severe core collapse of humongous stars. The other possibilities involve smaller black holes growing into larger ones via some kind of two-step process, says astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University in Connecticut. It could be either that two star-sized black holes came together and combined to form heavier behemoths or a small black hole was created and then sucked down gas and dust to balloon into a more massive beast. 'The question is: What are the cosmic environments and conditions where such things can happen?' Natarajan asks. One major clue might lie with the two new objects, which are spinning around like a top at close to the upper limit that scientists think they can spin. They have the fastest rotations of any black hole LIGO has ever seen. Some researchers have posited such spins could arise when smaller black holes meet, merge, and spin each other up. But Natarajan thinks perhaps something else is going on here. Because if the colliding black holes were spinning in opposite directions (and there's a good chance they were) the merger black hole would have produced a slower-spinning object. She favors the idea that smaller black holes were born in dense stellar clusters full of gas and dust. As that star-sized black hole bounced around inhaling material like water going down a drain, it could have grown and spun up to the extreme rotation seen in the new objects. She and her colleagues are working to calculate the exact outcome of such a feasting process in stellar clusters. Scientists aren't done searching for enormous black holes Future upgrades to the LIGO detectors will make them more sensitive, letting them uncover even more enormous black holes and measure their properties more precisely. Along with gravitational wave detectors in Europe, Japan, and eventually India, researchers will be able to pinpoint black hole events better on the night sky, allowing telescopes to scope those areas out and see if there's, for instance, a dense star cluster that might favor one formation mechanism or another. Researchers are also looking forward to instruments such as the Cosmic Explorer and Einstein Telescope, expected to be operational in the mid-2030s or 40s, which will be able to see black hole mergers that occurred much earlier in the universe's history. Such gravitational wave observatories might be able to capture events when galaxies were first forming, potentially providing insights into how their central black holes became so gargantuan, along with better data on small and intermediate black holes. 'There's just so many black holes littered in the universe,' says Natarajan. 'The fact that we're starting to bridge these scales, I think that's super exciting.' 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National Geographic
5 days ago
- Science
- National Geographic
Scientists record a black hole collision they weren't sure was possible
The largest black hole collision ever recorded has scientists' jaws on the floor — and scratching their heads. This computer-simulated image shows a supermassive black hole at the core of a galaxy. Image by NASA, ESA, and D. Coe, J. Anderson, and R. van der Marel (STScI) A pair of newly-discovered record-breaking black holes has scientists simultaneously popping the champagne and scratching their heads. The massive duo are the largest ever recorded at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which was built to detect ripples in the fabric of spacetime caused by the collisions of massive objects. These enormous outliers are challenging theorists to figure out just how they grew to such titanic sizes. 'We don't think black holes form between about 60 and 130 times the mass of the sun, and these two seem to be pretty much slap bang in the middle of that range,' says Mark Hannam, a physicist at Cardiff University in the UK and a LIGO team member. Your normal everyday black hole is thought to be born during the death of a giant star, when the star's weighty core collapses down into an infinitesimal point with such strong gravity that nothing, not even light, can escape it. But the physics of this process gets wonky for especially huge stars. Once their cores weight more than around 60 solar masses, the collapse becomes so violent that the entire star is blown to smithereens, leaving nothing, not even a black hole, behind. Yet LIGO is now spotting more and more black holes within this 'forbidden' zone, including the newest behemoths. They are thought to be 103 and 137 times the sun's mass, according to a paper posted July 13 to but each has enough uncertainty in their measured properties that they could both be inside the prohibited range. When they met and merged out in the deep dark universe billions of years ago, they created an even larger monster tipping the scales at between 190 and 265 solar masses, the most massive beast LIGO has ever seen. As the observatory captures gravitational waves from more such events, researchers will be able to tease apart the mystery of their creation and perhaps learn whether they have a connection to the astoundingly huge black holes lurking in the centers of galaxies. Black holes were thought to come in two flavors. This discovery is a strange third For a long time, black holes were known to come in just two versions—approximately sun-sized and galactic. Most of the roughly 300 black holes LIGO has detected so far fit into the first category: They are between a few and several tens of times the sun's mass and are believed to have formed after a gargantuan star exploded as a supernova, leaving behind a dense remnant that inexorably sucks in anything that gets too close. The second version is a much more gargantuan beast. Telescopes have spotted black holes in the centers of nearly every galaxy; gravitational monstrosities weighing 100 million solar masses or more that appear to regulate star formation within these galaxies. Nobody is quite sure how these immense devourers got so big. Did they start out as sun-scale black holes and then somehow grow to extreme size? Or was there another story behind their creation? The existence of black holes in the intermediate range—somewhere between 100 and 100,000 times the sun's mass—would help bridge this gap and perhaps help explain whether small black holes were turning into larger ones. But, until recently, physicists had never seen one. To great fanfare in 2020, LIGO researchers announced that they'd found a black hole duo with masses 66 and 85 times that of the sun, whose smash-up produced a giant with around 150 solar masses. The finding for the first time showed that black holes could cross into this threshold of intermediate mass, though theorists are still debating exactly how that happened. The problem is that when a gigantic star has a core that weights between 60 and 130 times the sun's mass, it can reach blazing temperatures nearing 300 million degrees Celsius during the end of its life. At that point, particles of light spontaneously transform into electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons. These particles can no longer hold up the star's heavy outer layers, which come crashing down with such ferocity that the core is completely obliterated. No black hole, or anything else, results. Physicists have speculated about a few possibilities to explain what they're seeing with LIGO. For one, their theories of stellar evolution might be wrong and perhaps something can survive the severe core collapse of humongous stars. The other possibilities involve smaller black holes growing into larger ones via some kind of two-step process, says astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University in Connecticut. It could be either that two star-sized black holes came together and combined to form heavier behemoths or a small black hole was created and then sucked down gas and dust to balloon into a more massive beast. 'The question is: What are the cosmic environments and conditions where such things can happen?' Natarajan asks. One major clue might lie with the two new objects, which are spinning around like a top at close to the upper limit that scientists think they can spin. They have the fastest rotations of any black hole LIGO has ever seen. Some researchers have posited such spins could arise when smaller black holes meet, merge, and spin each other up. But Natarajan thinks perhaps something else is going on here. Because if the colliding black holes were spinning in opposite directions (and there's a good chance they were) the merger black hole would have produced a slower-spinning object. She favors the idea that smaller black holes were born in dense stellar clusters full of gas and dust. As that star-sized black hole bounced around inhaling material like water going down a drain, it could have grown and spun up to the extreme rotation seen in the new objects. She and her colleagues are working to calculate the exact outcome of such a feasting process in stellar clusters. Scientists aren't done searching for enormous black holes Future upgrades to the LIGO detectors will make them more sensitive, letting them uncover even more enormous black holes and measure their properties more precisely. Along with gravitational wave detectors in Europe, Japan, and eventually India, researchers will be able to pinpoint black hole events better on the night sky, allowing telescopes to scope those areas out and see if there's, for instance, a dense star cluster that might favor one formation mechanism or another. Researchers are also looking forward to instruments such as the Cosmic Explorer and Einstein Telescope, expected to be operational in the mid-2030s or 40s, which will be able to see black hole mergers that occurred much earlier in the universe's history. Such gravitational wave observatories might be able to capture events when galaxies were first forming, potentially providing insights into how their central black holes became so gargantuan, along with better data on small and intermediate black holes. 'There's just so many black holes littered in the universe,' says Natarajan. 'The fact that we're starting to bridge these scales, I think that's super exciting.'
Time of India
6 days ago
- Science
- Time of India
India stepping up space life sciences push: Experts
BENGALURU: 's space research priorities are expanding to include the chemistry of life's origins and the biology of survival beyond Earth, experts said on Wednesday at the second Symposium on Genesis and Evolution of Organics in Space here. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now More than 70 scientists from India and abroad, including from Isro, Raman Research Institue, Institute of Astrophysics, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research , Physical Research Laboratory, IITs, IISERs, the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics and international institutes from France, Italy, Denmark, and the Netherlands, participated in the even held at GITAM (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru. They discussed how complex organic molecules, considered precursors to life, form and evolve in extraterrestrial environments. 'This is just the beginning phase of understanding life… There's a possibility for people from different domains to come together to seek, understand, and create the infrastructure to develop this across communities. It is very exciting for people to talk about alternate chemistries and methods by which life can be created,' former Isro chairman S Somanath , said. His predecessor, AS , echoed this view, saying events like this are significant in addressing different aspects of life and visualising the human desire to create life from non-life entities. We need to make a difference in the way we understand the universe. The symposium is part of the Organics in Space Initiative, which seeks to build collaborative research capacity in astrochemistry, planetary organics, and microbial biology in space. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Participants discussed payload design for life-detection, catalytic processes in interstellar environments, and studies of biosignatures. Shivkumar Kalyanaraman , CEO of the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), said: 'India's scientific ecosystem is evolving, and deep space research and life sciences must unite to address the challenges of exploration and sustainability. Events like this symposium help define national research priorities.' RRI director Prof Tarun Souradeep , added that bottom-up consortiums can work. 'The LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) India project was proposed from an undefined consortium, yet that went through. It is heartening to see similar models developing here.' The symposium will generate draft proposals, collaborative white papers, and working groups.
Scientific American
7 days ago
- Science
- Scientific American
Monster Black Hole Merger Is Most Massive Ever Seen
Physicists have detected the biggest ever merger of colliding black holes. The discovery has major implications for researchers' understanding of how such bodies grow in the Universe. 'It's super exciting,' says Priyamvada Natarajan, a theoretical astrophysicist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who was not involved in the research. The merger was between black holes with masses too big for physicists to easily explain. 'We're seeing these forbidden high-mass black holes,' she says. The discovery was made by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a facility involving two detectors in the United States. It comes at a time when US funding for gravitational-wave detection faces devastating cuts. The results, released as a preprint on the arXiv server 1, were presented at the GR-Amaldi gravitational-waves meeting in Glasgow, UK, on 14 July. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. Forbidden mass LIGO detects gravitational waves by firing lasers down long, L-shaped arms. Minuscule changes in arm length reveal the passage of gravitational waves through the planet. The waves are ripples in space-time, caused by massive bodies accelerating, such as when two inspiralling black holes or neutron stars merge. Hundreds of these mergers have been observed using gravitational waves since LIGO's first detection in 2015. But this latest detection, made in November 2023, is the biggest yet. By modelling the signal detected by LIGO, scientists have calculated that the event, dubbed GW231123, was caused by two black holes with masses of about 100 and 140 times that of the Sun merging to form a final black hole weighing in at some 225 solar masses. 'It's the most massive [merger] so far,' says Mark Hannam, a physicist at Cardiff University, UK, and part of the LVK Collaboration, a wider network of gravitational-wave detectors that encompasses LIGO, Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan. It's 'about 50% more than the previous record holder', he says. Most of the events captured by LIGO involve stellar mass black holes — those ranging from a few to 100 times the mass of the Sun — which are thought to form when massive stars end their lives as supernovae. However, the two black holes involved in GW231123 fall in or near a predicted range, of 60–130 solar masses, at which this process isn't expected to work, with theories instead predicting that the stars should be blown apart. 'So they probably didn't form by this normal mechanism,' says Hannam. Instead, the two black holes probably formed from earlier merger events — hierarchical mergers of massive bodies that led to the event detected by LIGO, which is estimated to have happened 0.7 to 4.1 billion parsecs away (2.3—13.4 billion light years). It's like 'four grandparents merging into two parents merging into one baby black hole', says Alan Weinstein, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and also part of the LVK Collaboration. Models of the black holes also suggest that they were spinning exceedingly fast — about 40 times per second, which is near the limit of what Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts black holes can reach while remaining stable. 'They're spinning very close to the maximal spin allowable,' says Weinstein. Both the spin and the mass could provide clues to how black holes grow in the Universe. One of the biggest questions in astronomy is how the largest black holes, the supermassive black holes found at the centres of galaxies such as the Milky Way, grew in the early cosmos. Although there is plenty of evidence for the existence of stellar mass black holes and supermassive black holes — those of more than a million solar masses — intermediate mass black holes in the range of 100 to 100,000 solar masses have been harder to find. 'We don't see them,' says Natarajan. The latest detection might tell us that 'these intermediate-mass black holes of several hundred solar masses play a role in the evolution of galaxies', says Hannam, perhaps through hierarchical mergers, which could increase the spin speed, as well as the mass, of the resulting black holes. 'Little by little, we're building up a list of the kind of black holes that are out there,' he says. Cuts ahead That growth in knowledge could be hampered by the administration of US President Donald Trump and its proposed cuts to the US National Science Foundation, which runs LIGO. Under the proposal, one of LIGO's two gravitational-wave observatories would be shut down. At the time of this detection in November 2023, Virgo and KAGRA were not operational. Without two detectors, scientists would not have been sure that they had made a real detection of two merging black holes, says Hannam. 'Because we had two detectors, we saw the same blip at the same time,' he says. The closure of one of the observatories would be 'catastrophic', says Natarajan. 'This discovery would not be possible if one arm was turned off.' Planned upgrades to LIGO in the coming years, and the addition of new detectors around the world, including one in India, could greatly increase physicists' capabilities in gravitational-wave research, an area of astronomy that is still in its infancy. 'We're going to be seeing thousands of black holes in the next few years,' says Hannam. 'There's this huge investment that's been done, and it's only just beginning to pay off.'
STV News
11-07-2025
- Science
- STV News
New Scottish 'cosmic country' dance set to celebrate Einstein discovery
Hundreds of scientists are to take part in the debut of a new Scottish country dance inspired by the ripples in spacetime first theorised by Albert Einstein. Researchers from the University of Glasgow teamed up with the culture and research organisation Science Ceilidh to develop a dance to mark the 10th anniversary of the historic first detection of gravitational waves – a groundbreaking discovery which established a new field of astronomy. The dance will be premiered next week at the joint GR–Amaldi meeting, an international science conference which will be held at Glasgow's Scottish Exhibition Centre between Monday July 14 and Friday July 18. The event's organisers expect many of the conference's more than 800 delegates, who are researchers and educators from around the world, to participate in the first large-scale performance of the dance at a ceilidh on Thursday July 17. The dance has been developed to creatively represent the gravitational-wave signals measured by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), as well as the black holes that create them. The first observation of gravitational waves was made by LIGO on September 14 2015. The gravitational-wave signal – a ripple in spacetime – had originated from the merger of two black holes, each about 30 times the mass of our Sun, to form a black hole of about 60 times the mass of our Sun. LIGO's detection provided the first direct observation of gravitational waves almost a century after Einstein predicted their properties in his general theory of relativity. The detection inaugurated the field of gravitational-wave astronomy, which uses extremely sensitive detectors to measure the miniscule ripples in spacetime. Sophisticated analysis of gravitational-wave signals enables astronomers to make observations of cosmic events that are not possible with conventional telescopes. UofGcomms/ Chris James The dance has been developed to creatively represent the gravitational-wave signals measured by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), as well as the black holes that create them. The September 14 2015 discovery was the first-ever observation of two black holes orbiting each other, but astronomers have now observed hundreds of such sources. As the field has progressed, the USA-based LIGO has been joined by gravitational-wave observatories in Europe (Virgo) and Japan (KAGRA). The LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA observatory network are currently in their fourth observing run, due to finish in November of this year. University of Glasgow researchers made leading contributions to the UK's role in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, developing the delicate mirror suspensions which made the detection possible, and have played key roles in data analysis and detector design improvements. Dr Christopher Berry from the University of Glasgow's School of Physics and Astronomy is chair of the conference's local organising committee. He said: 'We are delighted to host the GR–Amaldi conference here in Glasgow during the tenth anniversary year of the revolutionary first observation of gravitational waves. 'Glasgow physicists and astronomers have been pioneering gravitational research since the 1960s, and we are excited to continue to play key roles in this international field of research. The last ten years have completely revolutionised our understanding of black holes. 'It felt right to welcome our visitors to the city with a traditional Scottish dance, and to give it a cosmic twist inspired by the research that unites us. It's been fantastic to work with Science Ceilidh to develop this dance, and we're excited to welcome hundreds of our colleagues to enjoy it with us next week. I hope they take away not just happy memories of the conference, but a uniquely Scottish way of communicating our research.' The dance was developed through workshop sessions between Glasgow physicists and the Science Ceilidh team. The dance represents the life-cycle of black holes and how they form orbiting pairs before finally colliding to create, in just a few seconds, the signal detected on Earth. At the climax of the dance, participants are encouraged to let out a celebratory 'whoop' which represents what astrophysicists call the ringdown. That is the final stage of a binary black hole merger which 'rings' spacetime like a bell and sends out the ripples which make detection possible on Earth. Lewis Hou, Science Ceilidh's director, guided the development of the dance. He said: 'Working with University of Glasgow researchers on developing this dance has been a fantastic experience. I've learned a lot about gravitational waves in our workshop sessions, where we gave a lot of thought to how we could represent gravitational waves creatively. 'What we've ended up with is a dance which is great fun to perform but has a real basis in science. It represents the process of black hole coalescence through dance, inspired by how black holes interact, pair up, get closer to each other and finally merge. 'Our plan once the ceilidh has been performed for the first time at GR–Amaldi is to take it on the road and to continue to develop it with educators, youth workers and local youth groups to help young people understand gravitational waves through dance and bring their own creativity and curiosity to build on it.' The GR–Amaldi Meeting's full title is the 24th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation (GR) and the 16th Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves (Amaldi). The GR meeting is held every three years, and the Amaldi meeting is held every two years, and they are held together every six years. Getty Images Albert Einstein theorised ripples in spacetime in his1915 theory of relativity This is the first time the joint GR–Amaldi meeting has been held in the UK. The meeting organisation is being led by the University of Glasgow and the Institute of Physics. The event brings together international experts in classical and quantum gravity, mathematical and applied relativity, gravitational-wave instrumentation and data-analysis, multimessenger astronomy, relativistic astrophysics and cosmology. This year's meeting also includes a series of public events, including lectures from Star Trek science consultant Dr Erin MacDonald on July 13 and Professor Carole Mundell, the European Space Agency's director of science on Wednesday July 16 and a science and art exhibition with pieces contributed by scientists to represent their own work. The Institute of Physics Scotland is also supporting Science Ceilidh to work with a local youth group to further develop the dance, and document it for use by other educators. An Early Career Workshop in advance of the main conference will run between July 10 and July 12. A Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon on 13th July will aim to improve the quality of pages related to topics of the meeting, with a focus on making biographies for women scientists to reflect the gender balance of the field. Professor Sir Keith Burnett, President of the Institute of Physics said: 'The Institute of Physics is proud to support this event which brings together experts from across the globe. It is an exciting year for science, as we meet in Glasgow to celebrate the milestone anniversary of the first observation of gravitational waves. Truly remarkable.' Get all the latest news from around the country Follow STV News Scan the QR code on your mobile device for all the latest news from around the country
