Newly released data confirms an idea based on Einstein’s century-old theory of gravitation.
Since 2006, astrophysicists have shown through computer simulations that when two black holes merge, the gravitational waves emitted during this interaction carry linear momentum with them. This, in turn, could potentially impart a large recoil, or “kick,” to the product of that merger: a bigger black hole.
But Varma and his colleagues analyzed new data that was released last November via a collaboration between the U.S.-based LIGO, the European-based Virgo, and the Japan-based KAGRA observatories. These leading facilities for gravitational wave astronomy, which had received recent boosts in detector sensitivity, recorded a particular gravitational wave event — officially dubbed GW200129 — which provided information on a black hole merger occurring roughly 3 billion light-years away.
The size of that recoil would depend on the extent to which the spins of the two black holes are misaligned and start “precessing,” — or wobbling like tops before they fall over. “There wouldn’t be a [large] kick without precession,” Field adds, “and the greater the precession, roughly speaking, the greater the kick.”
Leo Stein, a University of Mississippi physicist who was not part of the study, agrees with that assessment. “That big kick was big enough to kick the remnant out of its cluster,” Stein says. “So it’s now a rogue black hole wandering around its galaxy, likely to never be heard of again.”Current theories hold that a black hole forms when a heavy star exhausts its nuclear fuel and collapses.
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