LIGO's Sharpest Detection Yet Confirms Famous Stephen Hawking Theory
upstart writes:
LIGO's discovery of gravitational waves-ripples in space-time from powerful cosmic events-hit astrophysics more like a tidal wave than a ripple. At the dawn of its tenth anniversary, the multinational collaboration has set another scientific milestone, this time solving not one but two mysteries in black hole physics.
A paper published today in Physical Review Letters describes how the LIGO-VIRGO-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration captured the sharpest-ever gravitational wave signal from a black hole merger. Further analysis of GW250114, the signal in question, validates two major predictions made by Stephen Hawking and Roy Kerr in 1971 and 1963, respectively.
First, we're more certain than ever that when black holes merge, the resulting black hole is wider than both parts combined. Second, we only need to know two metrics to describe gravitational disturbances in black holes: mass and spin.
"It's a beautiful, landmark result," Arthur Kosowsky, a theoretical physicist at the University of Pittsburgh who wasn't involved in the new work, told Gizmodo in an email. The latest results are "a confirmation of both the fundamental nature of a spinning black hole and also a remarkable test of strong-field general relativity," he added.
The latest results come almost ten years after GW150914, the first gravitational wave signal ever detected, which LIGO observed in 2015. In 2021, physicists used the 2015 signal to test Hawking's theorem. The team assessed a confidence level of 95% for this test, but with the new, cleaner result, that has jumped to an impressive 99.999%-as close as one gets to the "truth" in modern science.
"A decade ago we couldn't be certain that black holes ever collide in our universe," Steve Fairhurst, LIGO spokesperson and a physicist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, told Gizmodo. "Now we observe several black hole mergers per week. With the 300 gravitational-wave candidates observed to date, we're beginning to provide a census of the population of black holes in the universe."
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