Overlooked gravitational-wave signals point to ‘exotic’ black holes
In a new analysis of gravitational-wave data, scientists with the international LIGO-Virgo Collaboration (LVC) have discovered ten new examples of merging binary black holes. Over the past seven years, the researchers have observed 90 gravitational-wave signals – ripples in the space-time continuum that indicate cataclysmic events such as black hole mergers, the research team said. They originally detected 44 such mergers during a six-month observational period in 2019, but a second look at the data using a different methodology revealed ten additional ones.
These newly detected mergers suggest “exotic astrophysical scenarios” that can be studied only through the gravitational waves that emanate from them, those behind the detections argue. For instance, one of the mergers appears to be a neverbefore-observed type of system in which a heavy black hole is consuming a smaller black hole that had been orbiting it in the opposite direction of its own spin. The discovery of the new mergers fills gaps in existing black hole data, as some of the black holes have higher or lower masses than are predicted by widely accepted nuclear physics models.