turn up entirely new insights about black holes<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u201cIt is increasingly clear, both from individual events and population analyses, that massive black holes exist in [this] range,\u201d the researchers wrote in the latest paper. \u201cThese observations have spurred further investigation into mechanisms that can populate this gap.\u201d<\/p>\n
A wobbly imprint <\/p>\n
The latest research represents one such investigation. During mergers, the two black holes spiral toward each other along an orbital plane. When one or both black hole spins are misaligned, the orbital plane can wobble, or \u201cprecess,\u201d the researchers explained to MIT News. The degree to which the disk wobbles acts as a parameter from which researchers can measure the masses and spins of the merging black holes.<\/p>\n
One telling sign of hierarchical mergers is that they\u2019re \u201clopsided,\u201d meaning one of the pair has a much higher spin and mass than the other. For the study, the team created an analytic model to capture the kind of wobble that would have emerged from second-generation black holes. Around 14% of merging black holes followed this pattern, and the second-generation black holes identified had a very specific range of masses, at around 20 solar masses or 40 solar masses and above.<\/p>\n
Of mysterious origins <\/p>\n
To be fair, that might not sound like a whole lot. But it demonstrates that a sizeable portion of known black holes indeed follow this pattern. As for why, the team suspects hierarchical mergers emerge from dense stellar environments. Simply, when multiple neighboring stars die and collapse into black holes, the dense environment can make it easier for those black holes to find each other and merge. That could further lead to the formation of second-generation black holes. Theoretically, this could \u201crepeat potentially ad infinitum, by virtue of the fact that you have a ton of stars and black holes in this really dense environment,\u201d Plunkett said.<\/p>\n
But an ensuing mystery concerns those black holes in the 40-and-above regime, which coincides with the aforementioned \u201cdeath zones\u201d for black hole masses. According to stellar evolution theory, black holes born of supernovas shouldn\u2019t leave any black holes above roughly 45 solar masses, explained Plunkett.<\/p>\n
\u201cYet we have seen black holes that are that massive,\u201d she mused. \u201cAnd the question is: Where did they come from?\u201d<\/p>\n
For now, it\u2019s hard to say when we\u2019ll get an answer to that question, if ever. But one thing seems to be clear: black holes are a lot weirder than we could ever imagine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since LIGO\u2019s Nobel-winning discovery of gravitational waves\u2014ripples in spacetime\u2014the U.S.-based detector has been picking up on hundreds of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":926265,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[25],"tags":[5163,45483,45484,492,159,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-926264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-physics","tag-black-holes","tag-gravitational-wave","tag-ligo","tag-physics","tag-science","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116897635951870634","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=926264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/926264\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/926265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=926264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=926264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=926264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}