GRAVITATIONAL WAVES SPOTTED FOR THIRD TIME
They bolster Einstein’s theory of general relativity
MIAMI Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration.
The group includes more than 1,000 international scientists who perform LIGO research together with the European-based Virgo Collaboration.
In all three cases, each of the twin detectors of LIGO detected gravitational waves from the tremendously energetic mergers of black hole pairs.
“These are collisions that produce more power than is radiated as light by all the stars and galaxies in the universe at any given time,” said a LIGO statement.
The latest black hole collision, resulting in a detectable “chirp” of a gravitational wave, happened when two black holes merged, forming a new one that is about 49 times the mass of the sun.
Its size is smack in the middle of the first such black hole merger detected by LIGO, at 62 solar masses, and the second, which had 21.
“We have further confirmation of the existence of stellar-mass black holes that are larger than 20 solar masses — these are objects we didn’t know existed before LIGO detected them,” said Shoemaker, a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The first-ever direct observation of gravitational waves was made in September 2015, and detected an event some 1.3 billion light-years away.
The second came shortly after, in December 2015, and was a distance of 1.4 billion light-years. The third detection, called GW170104, was made on Jan 4 last year.
It was more than twice as old and more than twice as distant as the first two events. AFP