![]() What mechanisms produce these black holes? Are they the product of the evolution of two stars, similar to our sun but significantly more massive, evolving within a binary system? Or do they result from black holes in densely populated star clusters running into each other by chance? Or might a more exotic mechanism be involved? All of these questions are still hotly debated today. According to astrophysicists, the two merging black holes at the origin of the signal were about 30 times the mass of the sun and located 1.5 billion light-years away. Therefore, when the tiny ripples in space-time produced by the merger of two black holes were detected in 2015 by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), it was hailed as a watershed moment. Their gravitational field is so intense that neither matter nor radiation can evade them, making their detection exceedingly difficult. Stellar-mass black holes are celestial objects born from the collapse of stars with masses of a few to low hundreds of times that of our sun. Since then, dozens of such observations have sparked the quest among astrophysicists to understand the astrophysical origins of gravitational waves. The groundbreaking detection of gravitational waves in 2015, caused by the coalescence of two black holes, opened a new window into the universe. ![]() Linzer Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy in Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA).īlack holes, some of the most captivating entities in the cosmos, possess an immense gravitational pull so strong that not even light can escape. “POSYDON has demonstrated that such massive black holes might exist in Milky Way-like galaxies, and we have provided a physical explanation for why this is possible.” “Models prior to POSYDON predicted a negligible formation rate of merging binary black holes in galaxies similar to the Milky Way, and they particularly did not anticipate the existence of merging black holes as massive as 30 times the mass of our sun,” said Kalogera, a co-author of the study. The study is the first to utilize the newly released open-source POSYDON software to investigate merging binary black holes. The results are published today (June 29) in the journal Nature Astronomy. The University of Geneva (UNIGE) led the study the team also included scientists from the University of Florida and other institutions. The team, which includes Northwestern’s Vicky Kalogera, used the POSYDON code’s recent major advancements in simulating binary-star populations to provide new insights into the formation mechanisms of merging black holes in galaxies like our own. ![]() Northwestern University astrophysicists are part of an international team of scientists using advanced simulation tools that has predicted the existence of merging massive, 30 solar mass black hole binaries in Milky Way-like galaxies, challenging previous theories. Journal: Nature Astronomy Published Paper ![]()
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