California Institute of Technology | 2019 Jan 24
Physicists use supercomputers and AI to create the most accurate model yet of black hole mergers
One of the most cataclysmic events to occur in the cosmos involves the collision of two black holes. Formed from the deathly collapse of massive stars, black holes are incredibly compact—a person standing near a stellar-mass black hole would feel gravity about a trillion times more strongly than they would on Earth. When two objects of this extreme density spiral together and merge, a fairly common occurrence in space, they radiate more power than all the stars in the universe. ...
In a new study in the January 11 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters, Varma and his colleagues report the most accurate computer model yet of the end stage of black hole mergers, a period when a new, more massive black hole has formed. The model, which was aided by supercomputers and machine-learning, or artificial intelligence (AI) tools, will ultimately help physicists perform more precise tests of Einstein's general theory of relativity. ...
High-Accuracy Mass, Spin, and Recoil Predictions of Generic Black-Hole Merger Remnants ~ Vijay Varma et al
- Physical Review Letters 122(1):1101 (11 Jan 2019) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.011101
arXiv.org > gr-qc > arXiv:1809.09125 > 24 Sep 2018 (v1), 10 Jan 2019 (v2)