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It Takes Three to TangoĪ possible answer would be found in the harsh environment in the centers of galaxies harboring a giant black hole millions of times the mass of the Sun surrounded by a flat, rotating disk of gas. “It made me start thinking about how such non-circular (known as “eccentric”) mergers can happen with the surprisingly high probability as the observation suggests,” says Johan Samsing. This observation made many people around the world, including Johan Samsing in Copenhagen, wonder,

“This is because of the fundamental nature of the gravitational waves emitted, which not only brings the pair of black holes closer for them to finally merge but also acts to circularize their orbit.” explains co-author Zoltan Haiman, a Professor at Columbia University.

at the University of Florida.īut why is a non-circular orbit so unusual and unexpected? The black holes’ masses and spins were already surprising, but even more surprising was that they appeared not to have a circular orbit leading up to the merger,” says co-author Imre Bartos, Prof. “The gravitational wave event GW190521 is the most surprising discovery to date. Possible explanations have since been provided for these two characteristics, but the gravitational waves also revealed a third astonishing feature of this event - namely that the black holes did not orbit each other along a circle in the moments before merging. The event named GW190521 is understood to be the merger of two black holes, which not only were heavier than previously thought physically possible, but had in addition produced a flash of light. The mystery dates back to 2019, when an unexpected discovery of gravitational waves was made by the LIGO and Virgo observatories. He and his collaborators may have now provided a new piece to the puzzle, which possibly solves the last part of a mystery that astrophysicists have struggled with for the past few years. Johan Samsing from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, lead author of the paper. “But how and where in our Universe do such black holes form and merge? Does it happen when nearby stars collapse and both turn into black holes, is it through close chance encounters in star clusters, or is it something else? These are some of the key questions in the new era of Gravitational Wave Astrophysics,” says Assist. Up until a few years ago, light was our main source of knowledge about our universe and its black holes, until the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory ( LIGO) in 2015 made its breakthrough observation of gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes. Their suggested solution, now published in Nature, involves a chaotic triple drama inside a giant disk of gas around a super massive black hole in a galaxy far, far away.īlack holes are one of the most fascinating objects in the Universe, but our knowledge of them is still limited - especially because they do not emit any light.

Researchers provide the first plausible explanation to why one of the most massive black hole pairs observed to date by gravitational waves also seemed to merge on a non-circular orbit. The phase space of the billiard flow $\left\lbrace \Phi^t \right\rbrace$ ( $t \in \mathbb$.Illustration of a swarm of smaller black holes in a gas disk rotating around a giant black hole.