LIGO’s first black hole merger may have been 10 billion years in the making

poppageek
poppageek
Joined: 13 Aug 10
Posts: 259
Credit: 2473733122
RAC: 0
Topic 198660

Quote:

The LIGO detector has now seen at least two black hole mergers. The second merger it spotted was about what we would expect given a binary system of two massive stars. Both explode, leaving black holes behind that are just a bit more massive than the Sun; these later go on to merge.

But the first merger detected by LIGO was something rather unusual given that both black holes were around 30 times the Sun's mass. So far, we have not observed anything that could produce black holes in that mass range. Now, a new modeling study suggests that mergers with these sorts of masses might be common—but only if stars can collapse directly into a black hole without exploding first. This situation would require some of the Universe's most luminous stars to simply be winking out of existence.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/ligos-first-black-hole-merger-may-have-been-10-billion-years-in-the-making/

astro-marwil
astro-marwil
Joined: 28 May 05
Posts: 511
Credit: 402860831
RAC: 1048755

LIGO’s first black hole merger may have been 10 billion years

Hallo poppageek!
Seems to be interesting.I´ll read this in detail soon.

Kind regards and happy crunching
Martin

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.