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For the first time, scientists from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and the University of Florida believe they have detected merging black holes with eccentric orbits.
According to a research paper published in Nature Astronomy, this may help explain how some of the black hole mergers discovered by LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration are much heavier than previously thought.
Eccentric orbits are a sign that black holes can frequently swallow each other during chance encounters in regions densely packed with black holes, such as galactic cores. Scientists studied the largest gravitational wave binary observed to date, GW190521, to determine if the merger had eccentric orbits.
“The estimated mass of black holes is more than 70 times the size of our Sun each, making them well above the estimated maximum mass currently predicted by the theory of stellar evolution,” Carlos Lusto, professor of stellar evolution, said in a statement. • College of Mathematical Sciences and a member of the CCRG (Center for Computational Relativity and Gravity) in Rochester. “This is an interesting case to study as a second-generation system of binary black holes and opens up new possibilities for black hole formation scenarios in dense star clusters.”
The new research wanted to review the available data to see if black holes had highly skewed orbits before merging. They find that the best explanation for merging is a highly decentralized skew model. To achieve this, the team ran hundreds of new full-digital simulations on supercomputers in local and national labs, taking nearly a year to complete.
“This represents a huge advance in our understanding of how black holes merge,” Campanile said. “Through our cutting-edge supercomputer simulations, the wealth of new data provided by LIGO, and rapidly advancing Virgo detectors, we are making new discoveries about the universe at an astonishing rate.”
An extension of this analysis by the same RIT and UFL team used a potential electromagnetic isotope observed by the Zwicky Transient Facility observation instrument to independently calculate the Hubble cosmological constant with GW150521 as an eccentric binary black hole merger. They found excellent agreement with the expected values and recently published the work in The Astrophysical Journal.
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