I know, I know, these are starting to get passé. But this third event brings a little more information.
For the third time in a year and a half, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) has detected gravitational waves. […]
This most recent event, which we detected on Jan. 4, 2017, is the most distant source we’ve observed so far. Because gravitational waves travel at the speed of light, when we look at very distant objects, we also look back in time. This most recent event is also the most ancient gravitational wave source we’ve detected so far, having occurred over two billion years ago. Back then, the universe itself was 20 percent smaller than it is today, and multicellular life had not yet arisen on Earth.
The mass of the final black hole left behind after this most recent collision is 50 times the mass of our sun. Prior to the first detected event, which weighed in at 60 times the mass of the sun, astronomers didn’t think such massive black holes could be formed in this way. While the second event was only 20 solar masses, detecting this additional very massive event suggests that such systems not only exist, but may be relatively common.
Thanks to this third event, astronomers can set a stronger maximum mass for the graviton, the proposed name for any gravity force-carrying particle. They also have some hints as to how these black holes form; the axis of spin for these two black holes appear to be misaligned, which suggests they became binaries well after forming as opposed to starting off as binary stars in orbit. Finally, the absence of another signal tells us something important about intermediate black holes, thousands of times heavier than the Sun but less than millions.
The paper reports a “survey of the universe for midsize-black-hole collisions up to 5 billion light years ago,” says Karan Jani, a former Georgia Tech Ph.D. physics student who participated in the study. That volume of space contains about 100 million galaxies the size of the Milky Way. Nowhere in that space did the study find a collision of midsize black holes.
“Clearly they are much, much rarer than low-mass black holes, three collisions of which LIGO has detected so far,” Jani says. Nevertheless, should a gravitational wave from two Goldilocks black holes colliding ever gets detected, Jani adds, “we have all the tools to dissect the signal.”
If you want more info, Veritasium has a quick summary, while if you want something meatier the full paper has been published and the raw data has been released.
Otherwise, just be content that we’ve learned a little more about the world.