The largest-known merger of two black holes has been discovered by scientists in the United States using gravitational wave detectors.
The collision, which occurred in November 2023, was described at Glasgow, United Kingdom, this year’s International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation.
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A black hole is what?
Black holes are cosmic regions of space that contain a lot of matter packed into a relatively small space.
Nothing can escape from a gravitational pull so strong that light cannot even escape because of how much mass is packed into such a tiny space.
We are unsure of what exactly is inside of black holes because no light emits from them, making them invisible.
At the conclusion of a person’s life, giant stars are said to form black holes. When fusion reactions that keep them bright and hot run out of energy, the giant stars collapse.
What time and how did you find this black hole collision?
Two detectors simultaneously observed the collision, which resulted in a gravitational wave or sudden ripple in space-time, on November 23, 2023 just before 13:00 GMT.
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and these detectors are a part of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) network and are operated by the US states of Washington State and Louisiana.
Two large-scale laser interferometers serve as antennae for gravitational waves in the LIGO.
The collision’s gravitational wave, known as GW231123, was present for 0.1 seconds.
A highly sensitive laser interferometer-based large-scale physics observatory called LIGO, which is funded by the US National Science Foundation, can detect gravitational waves. The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientists and engineers created it.
Their collisions are invisible because black holes are completely dark, absorbing everything there is, including the light that surrounds them. Because of this, gravitational waves that cause their mergers are measured. Gravitational waves have discovered about 300 black holes.
Similar interferometers are KAGRA and Virgo, both of which are operated by the European Gravitational Observatory.
What happens when two black holes collide?
Black holes form larger black holes when they collide, which is what happened in this case.
The two black holes colliding had masses between 100 and 140 times the Sun’s total mass. More than 265 times the Sun’s mass was produced as a result of the collision.
This was much larger than the largest black hole collision, which had a mass of 140 times the Sun’s, GW190521. That collision, which occurred on May 21, 2019, was found 17 billion light years away from Earth.
What has this taught scientists, exactly?
Some black hole merger discoveries have been made as a result of the discovery.
According to Mark Hannam, a professor at Cardiff University and a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, “it increases our confidence that black holes can go through a series of successive mergers, to produce much more massive black holes.”
The previous-merger explanation is currently regarded as the most likely explanation because “we believe it’s unlikely that black holes that massive form out of dying stars.”
Will the Earth be affected by this?
No, neither the Milky Way galaxy nor the Earth will be impacted by the black hole collision.
According to Hannam, the black hole merger was the result of a collision between a few million and ten billion light years.
Since gravitational waves travel at the speed of light in a year and a light year is how far light travels in a year, the merger occurred millions of years ago.
According to Hannam, the separation of the two can also be expressed as roughly three gigaparsecs.
According to Wikipedia, “A parsec is approximately 31 trillion km, so converting the distance into kilometers produces numbers with no real names.”
