Gravitational Waves Reveal Hidden Populations Within Black Hole Mergers
MIT researchers found 14% of 155 black hole mergers may be second-generation, suggesting repeated collisions shape a larger share of the population.
5 Articles
5 Articles
Gravitational waves reveal hidden populations within black hole mergers
Since gravitational waves were first detected in 2015, instruments including LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA have picked up a steady stream of signals from colliding black holes, building a catalog that now numbers in the hundreds. Yet despite this wealth of data, a fundamental question has remained stubbornly unresolved: How do these black holes actually form?
Black Holes That Devour Their Own Kind: How Mergers Rewrite Cosmic Origins
Black holes have long stood as the universe’s most extreme objects. They swallow light. They warp spacetime. Yet their birth stories remain only partly told. For decades the standard account held that they arise when massive stars exhaust their fuel, collapse under gravity and explode as supernovae. Simple enough. But fresh gravitational-wave data tells a different tale. Some black holes are not born from stars at all. They are forged from the r…
Black holes are typically formed by the gravitational collapse of a massive star. But they can also have a different origin. A new black hole can also form when two "parent" black holes merge. New studies show that more of these objects are created this way than previously thought.
MIT researchers found evidence that an important part of the black holes detected through gravitational waves could belong to a second generation, which would help rebuild the evolutionary history of the Universe.
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