c. The Battle of Samsung / Niels
In 2019, the LIGO / VIRGO collaboration took the gravitational wave signal from the black hole connection, which has proven to be one of the record books. Named the “GW190521”, it was the largest and most distant signal ever detected, and produced the strongest signal ever detected, more “pop” than the usual “drink”.
Furthermore, the new black hole formed as a result of the merger is about 150 times heavier than our Sun, and GW190521 became the first direct observation of a medium-mass black hole. Even stranger, the two merging black holes were locked in an elliptical (not circular) orbit, and their spiral axes tilted more than normal compared to those orbits.
The physicists wanted nothing more than to present an interesting confusion that did not immediately apply to the established theory, and GW190521 provided them with it. New theoretical simulations suggest that all of these strange features could be explained by the presence of a third unique black hole horn in the final dance of the binary system to create a “chaotic tango”. New paper Published in Nature.
We are As mentioned earlierOn May 21, 2019, the inventors of the collaboration caught the signal of a binary black hole connection: four short movements lasting less than a tenth of a second. The shorter the signal, the more black holes converge – in this case 85 and 66 solar masses, respectively. The black holes come together to form a new, much larger black hole with a mass of about 142 solar masses, releasing energy equivalent to eight solar masses in the process – hence the strong signal taken by the inventors.
What made this event so extraordinary was the fact that 142 solar masses are located in the middle of what is called the “mass gap” of black holes. Most of these objects fall into two groups: galaxies such as stellar mass galaxies (some solar masses to ten solar masses) and those in the middle of our Milky Way (hundreds to billions of solar masses). The former is the result of massive star deaths in a central collapse supernova, while the latter formation process remains a mystery.
LEGO / Caltech / MIT / R. Injury (IPAC)
It is unusual for a leading black hole to have 85 solar masses because it contrasts with current stellar evolutionary models. Types of stars that form black holes between 65 and 135 solar masses do not become supernovae and therefore do not end up as black holes. Conversely, these stars become unstable and reduce a significant portion of their mass. Only then will they become supernovae – but the result will be a black hole of less than 65 solar masses.
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