CSIRO: 11-Year Cosmic Search Leads to Black Hole Rethink

[bystander]

Eleven Year Cosmic Search Leads to Black Hole Rethink
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation | 2015 Sep 24

One hundred years since Einstein proposed gravitational waves as part of his general theory of relativity, an 11-year search performed with CSIRO’s Parkes telescope has shown that an expected background of waves is missing, casting doubt on our understanding of galaxies and black holes.

For scientists gravitational waves exert a powerful appeal, as it is believed they carry information allowing us to look back into the very beginnings of the Universe. Although there is strong circumstantial evidence for their existence, they have not yet been directly detected.

The work, led by Dr Ryan Shannon (of CSIRO and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research), is published today in the journal Science.

Using Parkes, the scientists expected to detect a background ‘rumble’ of the waves, coming from the merging galaxies throughout the Universe, but they weren’t there.

The world-first research has caused scientists to think about the Universe in a different way. ...

Gravitational waves from binary supermassive black holes missing in pulsar observations - R. M. Shannonet al

• Science 349(6255):1522 (25 Sep 2015) DOI: 10.1126/science.aab1910

[Sawngrighter]

Two thoughts .. our earthbound view and 'snapshots' of cosmological events tries to persuade us that traumatic upheavals occur, but this is said to be not the case (except in such relatively minor occurences like asteriod strikes for example,) otherwise as in the case of Galaxy mergers it is said that there is so much space between stars in the galaxies that no two stars come close together as the galacies merge. So too could it be with the black holes .. that there merging if they merge is so slow and gentle over so much time that waves are not produced .. drop a stone in water and waves are produced, slowly immerse a stone in water and waves are not produced. Or perhaps the gravity of the merging black holes is so strong as to prevent waves from spreading.