Rss

Ligo’s black holes that helped prove Einstein’s theory of gravitational waves could have been born inside a massive star – By Abigail Beall – For Mailonline 13:02 17 Feb 2016 (updated 16:38 17 Feb 2016)

Scientists detected the first warping of space-time caused by a collision of two black holes last week.
The historic signals were picked up by two advanced detectors.
At the same time Nasa’s Fermi telescope detected a gamma ray burst.
Gamma rays could mean two black holes lived inside a rotating star.

Last week, scientists made the ‘the scientific breakthrough of the century’ with the detection of gravitational waves.

When the waves were detected, they knew they had been caused by two black holes 30 times the size of the sun colliding.

But a second signal, seen by a telescope in space suggests both black holes could have been formed inside a gigantic star.

The discovery was the first time anyone had detected the warping of space-time caused by a collision of two massive black holes – something first predicted in Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity in 1915.

These gravitational waves, created 1.3 billion light-years from Earth, help confirm our universe was created by the Big Bang, and will give an unprecedented glimpse into its beginning.

The historic signals were picked up by two advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories (Ligo) in Louisiana and Washington.

Just 0.4 seconds later, Nasa’s Fermi telescope also detected a gamma ray burst, a flash of electromagnetic rays associated with high energy collisions.

In order to produce a gamma ray burst, a black hole needs to be fed at an enormous rate of somewhere between the mass of a planet and the mass of the sun every second.

This is only possible to get near the centre of a massive star at the end of its life.

This gamma ray signal was a surprise for physicists, as they would not normally be associated with the merging of two black holes.

Leave a Reply