Black holes become larger as they merge-it concluded the collaboration Ligo, after an observation, which could finally prove a Stephen Hawking theory over 50.
An exceptionally intense collision between two black holes was detected by the Call Gravitational Wave Observatory, allowing physicists to test a theorem postulated by Stephen Hawking em 1971.
In his theorem, Hawking states that when two black holes merge, the resulting black hole’s horizon – the limit beyond which even light can not escape the clutches of a black hole – cannot have a smaller area than the sum of the two original black holes.
As it refers, the theorem is in tune with the second law of thermodynamicswhich states that entropy, or disorder within an object, never decreases.
Black hole fusions distort the fabric of the universe, producing small fluctuations in space-time known as gravitational waves, which cross the universe at the speed of light.
Five gravitational wave observatories on earth look for waves 10,000 times smaller than the nucleus of an atom. They include the two US-based interferomethan-Wave Observatory (Ligo) USA-Laser-based detectors plus the Virgo detector in Italy, Kagra in Japan and Geo600 in Germany, operated by an international collaboration known as Ligo Virgo-Kagra (LVK).
The recent collision, called GW250114it was almost identical to the one that created the first gravitational waves ever observed in 2015. Both involved black holes with masses between 30 and 40 times the mass of our sun and occurred at about 1.3 billion light years away.
This time, the updated call detectors had three times the sensitivity they had in 2015, so they managed to capture waves emanating from the collision with a unprecedented detail.
This allowed researchers to prove the Hawking theorem By calculating that the area of the horizon of events was, in fact, higher after the merger.
A 2021 study on the first collision detected corroborated the theory with a confidence level of 95%, but the new investigation, this Wednesday in Physical Review Letters Raises that confidence to 99,999%.
As New Scientist points out, in the 10 years that scientists have observed gravitational waves, they recorded about 300 collisions of black holes. But None has been captured as intensely and clearly as GW250114 – which was twice as “tall” than any other gravitational wave detected to date.
LVK’s latest data also allowed scientists to confirm the Equations of the 1960s Roy Kerr mathematician They predicted that black holes can be characterized only by two metrics: their mass and their angular moment. In essence, two black holes with the same mass and angular moment are mathematically identical.
Thanks to the GW250114 observations, we now know that this is true.
