Physics

The biggest. The farthest. The most energetic. A new detection of gravitational waves from two colliding black holes has racked up multiple superlatives.
What’s more, it also marks the first definitive sighting of an intermediate mass black hole, one with a mass between 100 and 100,000 times the sun’s mass. That midsize black hole was forged when the two progenitor black holes coalesced to form a larger one with about 142 solar masses. It significantly outweighs all black holes previously detected via gravitational waves, ripples that wrinkle spacetime in the aftermath of extreme events.
“This is the big guy we’ve been waiting for, for the longest time,” says Emanuele Berti, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved with the research. One of the behemoth’s two progenitors was itself so massive that scientists are pondering how to explain its existence.
Detected on May 21, 2019, the gravitational waves originated from a source about 17 billion light-years from Earth, making this the most distant detection confirmed so far. It’s also the most energetic event yet seen, radiating about eight times the equivalent of the sun’s mass in energy, says astrophysicist Karan Jani of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. “I hope it deserves its own entry in the record book.”

Sign Up For the Latest from Science News

Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox

The new event dethrones the previous record-holder, a collision that occurred about 9 billion light-years away that radiated about five solar masses worth of energy, and created a black hole of 80 solar masses (SN: 12/4/18).
Researchers with LIGO, or the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, in the United States and Advanced Virgo in Italy reported the new detection September 2 in two papers in Physical Review Letters and the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
While scientists know of black holes with tens of solar masses and others with millions or billions of solar masses, the intermediate echelon has remained elusive. Previous purported sightings of intermediate mass black holes have been questioned (SN:1/22/16).
But, for the new event, “there’s no doubt,” says astrophysicist Cole Miller of University of Maryland at College Park, who was not involved with the study. “This demonstrates that there is now at least one intermediate mass black hole in the universe.”
The black hole’s two progenitors were themselves heftier than any seen colliding before — at about 85 and 66 times the mass of the sun. That has scientists puzzling over how this smashup came to be.

Normally, physicists expect that the black holes involved in these mergers would each have formed in the collapse of a dying star. But in the new event, the larger of the pair is so big that it couldn’t have formed that way. The known processes that go on within a star’s core mean that stars that are the right mass to form such a big black hole would blow themselves apart completely, rather than leaving behind a corpse.
Instead, it might be that one or both of the colliding black holes formed from an earlier round of black hole mergers, within a crowded cluster of stars and black holes (SN: 1/30/17). That would make for a family tree that began with black holes lightweight enough to form from collapsing stars.
But there’s a problem with the multiple-merger explanation. Each time black holes merge, that coalescence provides a kick to their velocity, which would normally launch the resulting black hole out of the cluster, preventing further mergers.
However, mergers as massive as the new event seem to be very rare, given that LIGO and Virgo have detected only one. That means, Miller says, “my gosh, you’re allowed to invoke a tooth fairy,” a relatively unlikely process. Perhaps, he says, the kick might sometimes be small enough that the black holes could stay within their cluster and merge again.
The May 21 gravitational wave event had previously been publicly reported as an unconfirmed candidate, to allow astronomers to look for flashes of light in the sky that might have resulted from the collision. Some researchers had suggested that the waves might have been associated with a flare of light from the center of a distant galaxy (SN: 6/25/20). But that galaxy is significantly closer than the distance now pinpointed in the new papers, at about 8 billion light-years from Earth rather than 17 billion, making the explanation less plausible.
The longer LIGO and Virgo observe the heavens, the more the bounty of unusual events can be expected to grow, Miller says. “We are going to have a set of ‘gosh, didn’t expect that’ type of events, which are thrilling to think about and extremely informative about the universe.” More

Space weather forecasting is a guessing game. Predictions of outbursts from the sun are typically based on the amount of activity observed on the sun’s roiling surface, without accounting for the specific processes behind the blasts.
But a new technique could help predict the violent eruptions of radiation known as solar flares based on the physics behind them, researchers report in the July 31 Science. When applied to old data, the method anticipated several powerful flares, although it missed some as well.
Radiation released in solar flares and associated eruptions of charged particles, or plasma,can be harmful. This space weather can disrupt radio communications, throw off satellites, take down power grids and endanger astronauts (SN: 9/11/17). More accurate forecasts could allow operators to switch off sensitive systems or otherwise make preparations to mitigate negative effects.
Current prediction methods rely on tracking flare-linked phenomena such as large, complex sunspots — dark regions on the sun’s surface with powerful magnetic fields. But that leads to some false alarms.

Sign Up For the Latest from Science News

Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox

In contrast, the new prediction method is rooted in the intricacies of how and when the sun’s tangled loops of magnetic fields rearrange themselves, in a process known as magnetic reconnection, releasing bursts of energy that mark solar flares.
On the sun’s surface, magnetic fields can get gnarly. Magnetic field lines, imaginary contours that indicate the direction of the magnetic field at various locations, loop and cross over one another like well-mixed spaghetti. When those lines break and reconnect, a burst of energy is released, producing a flare. The details of how and under what conditions this happens have yet to be unraveled.
In the new study, physicist Kanya Kusano from Nagoya University in Japan and colleagues propose that the largest flares result when two arcing magnetic field lines connect, forming an m-shaped loop, as a smaller loop forms close to the sun’s surface. This “double-arc instability” leads to more magnetic reconnection, and the m-shaped loop expands, unleashing energy.
Using 11 years’ worth of data from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft, the researchers identified regions on the sun with high magnetic activity. For each region, the team determined whether conditions were ripe for a flare-inducing double-arc instability, and then aimed to predict the most powerful flares the sun produces, called X-class flares. The technique correctly predicted seven of nine flares that passed a threshold that the researchers chose, called X2, the second strength subdivision of the X-class.
The successful predictions suggest that researchers may have identified the physical process that underlies some of the largest outbursts.
“Prediction is a very good benchmark for how well we can understand nature,” Kusano says.
The unsuccessful predictions are likewise illuminating: “Even if it fails, it tells us something,” says solar physicist Astrid Veronig of the University of Graz in Austria, who wrote a commentary on the result, also published in Science. The two flares that the technique missed had no associated ejection of plasma from the sun’s surface. “This kind of instability is maybe not a good way to explain these other flares,” Veronig says. They may instead have resulted from magnetic reconnection high above, instead of close to, the sun’s surface.
The mechanism on which the researchers based their prediction “is really interesting and very insightful,” says solar physicist KD Leka of NorthWest Research Associates in Boulder, Colo. But, she notes, the method couldn’t predict how soon the flares will occur — whether the burst would come an hour or a day after the right conditions first occurred — and it didn’t identify slightly weaker X1 flares, or the next class down, known as M-class flares, which could still be damaging.
“The mantra that I live by,” Leka says, “is any rule you think you’ve figured out about the sun, it’s going to figure out how to break it.” More

A neutrino that plowed into the Antarctic ice offers up a cautionary message: Don’t stray too close to the edge of an abyss. The subatomic particle may have been blasted outward when a star was ripped to pieces during a close encounter with a black hole, physicists report May 11 at arXiv.org. If it holds […] More

As far as odd couples go, this is one for the record books. The ripples in spacetime stirred up by two distant, merging black holes suggest that one of the pair was much bigger than the other. It’s the first definitively mismatched black hole pair spotted by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations, which search for […] More