Black hole 'pooling' may explain strange aspects of 2019's black hole merger

Zoom † Illustration of a swarm of small black holes in a gas disk orbiting a supermassive black hole.

Samsing / Niels Bohr Institute

In 2019, the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration caught a gravitational wave signal from a black hole merger that turned out to be one of the record books. Dubbed ‘GW190521’, it was the most massive and farthest detected yet, producing the most energetic signals detected to date, appearing in the data as ‘higher’ than the usual ‘dice’.

In addition, the new black hole resulting from the merger was about 150 times more massive than our sun, making GW190521 the first direct observation of an intermediate-mass black hole. Even stranger is the merger of the two black holes in an elliptical (non-circular) orbit, and their axes of rotation were more inclined than usual compared to those orbits.

Physicists like nothing more than to present an intriguing puzzle that doesn’t seem to fit neatly into established theory, and GW190521 gave them just that. New theoretical simulations suggest that all of these strange aspects can be explained by the presence of one and a third black hole hitting the binary system’s last dance to produce a “chaotic dance,” according to new paper Published in Nature.

as we are I mentioned earlierOn May 21, 2019, Collaboration’s detectors picked up the telltale signal of a black hole binary merger: four short vibrations less than a tenth of a second. The shorter the signal, the greater the mass of the merged black holes – in this case 85 and 66 solar masses, respectively. The black holes merged into a new black hole larger than about 142 solar masses, emitting the equivalent of eight solar masses in the process – so the strong signal was picked up by the detectors.

What made this event unusual is that the measurement of 142 solar masses is located at the center of what is known as the “mass gap” of black holes. Most of these objects fall into two groups: stellar black holes (ranging from a few solar masses to tens of solar masses) and supermassive black holes, such as those at the center of our Milky Way (ranging from hundreds of thousands to billions of solar masses). The first reason is the death of massive stars in a supernova explosion in the core, while the composition of the latter remains a mystery.

Zoom † Artist’s concept of a hierarchical scheme for merging black holes. Scientists hypothesize that the two black holes were the result of a previous merger of two small black holes.

LEGO / Caltech / MIT / R. Hurt (IPAC)

The fact that the ancestors of the black hole weighed 85 solar masses is also unusual, as it conflicts with current models of stellar evolution. The types of stars that would give rise to black holes between 65 and 135 solar masses would not transform into a supernova, and thus would not end up as black holes. Instead, these stars will become unstable and lose much of their mass. Only then will they transform into a supernova – but the result will be a black hole of less than 65 solar masses.

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