An artist’s impression of two black holes about to collide and merge.
Recent simulations of two black holes colliding at close to the speed of light have shed light on the enigmatic physics behind what has been called by one astrophysicist as “one of the most violent events you can imagine in the universe.”
“It’s a bit of a crazy thing to blast two black holes head-on very close to the speed of light,” said Thomas Helfer, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University who produced the simulations. “The gravitational wavesGravitational waves are distortions or ripples in the fabric of space and time. They were first detected in 2015 by the Advanced LIGO detectors and are produced by catastrophic events such as colliding black holes, supernovae, or merging neutron stars.” data-gt-translate-attributes=”[{“attribute”:”data-cmtooltip”, “format”:”html”}]”>gravitational waves associated with the collision might look anticlimactic, but this is one of the most violent events you can imagine in the universe.”
The findings, published in Physical Review Letters, is the first detailed look at the aftermath of such a cataclysmic clash, and shows how a remnant black holeA black hole is a place in space where the gravitational field is so strong that not even light can escape it. Astronomers classify black holes into three categories by size: miniature, stellar, and supermassive black holes. Miniature black holes could have a mass smaller than our Sun and supermassive black holes could have a mass equivalent to billions of our Sun.” data-gt-translate-attributes=”[{“attribute”:”data-cmtooltip”, “format”:”html”}]”>black hole would form and send gravitational waves through the cosmos.
Black hole mergers are one of the few events in the universe energetic enough to produce detectable gravitational waves, which carry energy produced by massive cosmic collisions. Like ripples in a pond, these waves flow through the universe distorting space and time. But unlike waves traveling through water, they are extremely tiny, and propagate through “spacetime,” the mind-bending concept that combines the three dimensions of space with the idea of time.
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This simulation shows two black holes colliding near the speed of light, revealing the mysterious physics of what one astrophysicist calls “one of the most violent events you can imagine in the universe.” The work is the first detailed look at the aftermath of such a cataclysmic clash, and shows how a remnant black hole would form and send gravitational waves through the cosmos. Credit: Simulation courtesy of Thomas Helfer/Johns Hopkins University
“If a gravitational wave goes through me, it makes me a little thinner and a little taller, and then a little shorter and a little fatter,” said co-author Emanuele Berti, a Johns Hopkins physicist. “But the amount by which it does that is about 100,000 times smaller than the size of an atomic nucleus.”
Physicists have studied the waves emitted after black holes merge by simplifying general relativity—Einstein’s theory of how gravity works—using equations that ignore subtle, but important, gravitational effects of the merger. Berti thinks that approach is biased because it relies on “linear approximations,” the assumption that the gravitational waves produced during the merger are weak.
Although it is nearly impossible for black holes to collide at such extreme speeds, simulating such a crash produced signals strong enough for the team to detect nonlinearities, or gravitational effects that can’t be found with the simplified version of the theory. The findings suggest black hole mergers cannot be studied with linearized equations and that current models of these events need to be tweaked, if not changed altogether.
“General relativity is nonlinear, which means that the gravitational waves themselves will also produce more gravitational waves,” said Mark Ho-Yeuk Cheung, a Johns Hopkins doctoral physics student who led the research.
The team also spotted these so-called nonlinearities by analyzing simulations of two black holes merging after orbiting each other, a scenario that more realistically represents what happens in the universe. A study of the same simulations by an independent group of researchers at Caltech, also appears in Physical Review Letters and finds similar results.
“It’s kind of a big deal because we cannot forget about the complications if we really want to understand black holes,” Cheung said. “Einstein’s theory is a beast; the equations are really complicated.”
Reference: “Nonlinear Effects in Black Hole Ringdown” by Mark Ho-Yeuk Cheung, Vishal Baibhav, Emanuele Berti, Vitor Cardoso, Gregorio Carullo, Roberto Cotesta, Walter Del Pozzo, Francisco Duque, Thomas Helfer, Estuti Shukla and Kaze W. K. Wong, 22 February 2023, Physical Review Letters.
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.130.081401
The study was funded by the Croucher Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and NASAEstablished in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. Its vision is "To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity." Its core values are "safety, integrity, teamwork, excellence, and inclusion." NASA conducts research, develops technology and launches missions to explore and study Earth, the solar system, and the universe beyond. It also works to advance the state of knowledge in a wide range of scientific fields, including Earth and space science, planetary science, astrophysics, and heliophysics, and it collaborates with private companies and international partners to achieve its goals.” data-gt-translate-attributes=”[{“attribute”:”data-cmtooltip”, “format”:”html”}]”>NASA.
This work was produced with computational resources at the Maryland Advanced Research Computing Center and the Texas Advanced Computing Center.
Source: SciTechDaily
