Scientists Claim That Gravitational Waves Could Retrace the Origins of Black Holes in Dense Stars
Black holes have always been an object of intrigue for extra-terrestrial aficionados. Questions regarding its birth have always been a focus for astronomers. A study claims that these queries can be easily answered with the help of gravitational waves, stated Space dot com. A team of researchers expressed that the mass and spin of black holes observed during gravitational wave analysis can give information regarding their birth. The analysis was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Many astronomers challenged the long-held belief that black holes are formed after the death of a star. The debate originated due to the massive sizes of some black holes, that simply could not come into being just by the death of a star, as per researchers. Experts speculated that the creation of such black holes could only happen if two of their kind came together. Gravitational waves facilitate when ripples occur in the fabric of spacetime due to energetic events like the merging of black holes.
The study took into consideration 69 gravitational wave events involving binary Black holes, recorded by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo Observatory. Researchers noted that the black holes in these binary events exhibited a distinct spin pattern. The team observed a change in spin after the black hole reached a certain mass. This implied to experts that the particular black hole was a result of many past mergers. In this way, spins indicated the formation history of black holes.
Though researchers have spotted different spin patterns in black holes, it is still difficult to determine which is the most common of all these patterns, indicating the most typical method of creation. "As we observe more black hole mergers with gravitational wave detectors like LIGO and Virgo, it becomes ever clearer that black holes exhibit diverse masses and spins, suggesting they may have formed in different ways. However, identifying which of these formation scenarios is most common has been challenging," lead author, Dr. Fabio Antonini from Cardiff University's School of Physics and Astronomy said, Phys.org stated.
The team observed through gravitational wave data that there was a clear mass threshold, after which the spinning started to become different in the black holes. These findings showcase to experts that black holes are created through repeated collisions in clusters. "Our study gives us a powerful, data-driven way to identify the origins of a black hole's formation history, showing that the way it spins is a strong indicator of it belonging to a group of high-mass black holes, which form in densely populated star clusters where small black holes repeatedly collide and merge with one another," team member and University of Cambridge researcher, Isobel Romero-Shaw said. Researchers also claimed that the spin can help astronomers identify the place where these black holes were created. Based on spin distribution, experts can find out at which region of the space the black holes were birthed.
Researchers are hopeful that the findings will help them to improve computer models made to stimulate the formation of black holes and know more about the structure and background of these space phenomena. "Collaborating with other researchers and using advanced statistical methods will help to confirm and expand our findings, especially as we move toward next-generation detectors. The Einstein Telescope, for example, could detect even more massive black holes and provide unprecedented insights into their origins," Thomas Callister, one of the study's co-authors and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago said.