![]() ![]() Some of the new detections are still mysterious. “By looking at how a black hole is spinning, for example – how fast it’s spinning, versus … which way it’s pointed – can tell us more about how it came to be: whether these black holes lived their lives apart and met at some point or whether they were stars to begin with, and then collapsed down to form black holes, and then went on to merge and produce these gravitational waves,” she said. “This would help us to understand the process of stars when they finish their life cycle and run out of fuel and blow up and then collapse,” Scott said.Īnalysing certain properties of the mergers allowed scientists to determine how they were formed, Galaudage said. In future, astronomers may also be able to detect gravitational waves from stars as they become supernovae. Sign up to receive an email with the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning The scientists also discovered a “light” pair of black holes with a combined mass only 18 times that of the sun. Notable discoveries included two massive pairs of black holes orbiting each other – one pair that was 145 times as heavy as the mass of the sun, and the other 112 times. Of the 35 new detections, 32 likely resulted from pairs of black holes merging. “We can see things that are invisible, such as binary black hole mergers.” “Gravitational waves are not light,” Galaudage said. Monash University researcher Shanika Galaudage, a collaborator in the Australian branch of the project known as OzGrav, described gravitational waves as a game-changing “new window into the universe”. ![]() The first detection of gravitational waves, announced in 2016, confirmed a prediction Albert Einstein made a century earlier based on his general theory of relativity. Waves from these cataclysmic collisions were detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) observatory in the US and the Virgo instrument in Italy between November 2019 and March 2020. ![]()
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