Scientists confirm a highly eccentric black hole merger for the first time

The most massive black hole merger has been depicted by this artist's concept. Scientists from RIT and University of Florida used advanced computer simulations to show the black holes had eccentric orbits before they merged. Credit: Caltech/MIT/R. Hurt.

Scientists believe they have detected a merger of two black holes. A paper published in Nature Astronomy by researchers from Rochester Institute of Technology's Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation and the University of Florida explains how some of the black hole mergers detected by LIGO Scientific Collaboration are much heavier than previously thought.

Black holes could be goingbbling up other people in areas with lots of black holes. The scientists studied the most massive gravitational wave binaries to see if they had eccentric orbits.

Carlos Lousto, a professor in the School of Mathematical Sciences and a member of the CCRG, said that the estimated mass of the black holes is more than 70 times the size of our sun each. "This makes an interesting case to study as a second generation black hole system and opens up to new possibilities of formation scenarios of black holes in dense star clusters."

A team of RIT researchers including Lousto, Research Associate James Healy, Jacob Lange, and others formed to give a project. The high-eccentricity, precessing model is the best explanation for the merger. The team performed hundreds of new full numerical simulations in local and national lab supercomputers, taking nearly a year to complete.

"This is a major advancement in our understanding of black holes," said Campanelli. We are making new discoveries about the universe at an astonishing rate thanks to our sophisticated simulations and the wealth of new data provided by LIGO and Virgo's detectors.

The RIT and UFL team used a possible electromagnetic counterpart to compute the Hubble constant with an eccentric black hole merger. The work was published in the Astrophysical Journal after they found agreement with the values.

V. Gayathri et al have an estimate of eccentricity for black hole mergers. There is a DOI titled: 10.1038/s41550-021-01568-w.

V. Gayathri and her colleagues measured the Hubble Constant with a black hole Merger and its Potential Electromagnetic Counterpart in The Astrophysical Journal. There is a book titled "10847/2041-8213/abe388."

Nature Astronomy is in the Astrophysical Journal.

Scientists confirm a highly eccentric black hole merger for the first time on January 20, 2022.

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