Massachusetts Institute of Technology | 2018 Apr 10
Black holes in these environments could combine repeatedly to form objects bigger than anything a single star could produce.
When LIGO’s twin detectors first picked up faint wobbles in their respective, identical mirrors, the signal didn’t just provide first direct detection of gravitational waves — it also confirmed the existence of stellar binary black holes, which gave rise to the signal in the first place.
Stellar binary black holes are formed when two black holes, created out of the remnants of massive stars, begin to orbit each other. Eventually, the black holes merge in a spectacular collision that, according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, should release a huge amount of energy in the form of gravitational waves.
Now, an international team led by MIT astrophysicist Carl Rodriguez suggests that black holes may partner up and merge multiple times, producing black holes more massive than those that form from single stars. These “second-generation mergers” should come from globular clusters — small regions of space, usually at the edges of a galaxy, that are packed with hundreds of thousands to millions of stars. ...
Post-Newtonian Dynamics in Dense Star Clusters: Highly Eccentric,
Highly Spinning, and Repeated Binary Black Hole Mergers - Carl L. Rodriguez et al
- Physical Review Letters 120(15):1101 (13 Apr 2018) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.151101
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1712.04937 > 13 Dec 2017 (v1), 14 Mar 2018 (v3)
