The universe is ‘crowded’ with black holes, study finds

A new study has found there are areas of the universe that are littered with black holes, and these massive objects are merging all the time.

Published in the journal Nature, the new study projected numerous black hole collisions that produce gravity waves, like the ones recently observed by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO).

“The universe isn’t the same everywhere,” study author Richard O’Shaughnessy, an astrophysicist from the Rochester Institute of Technology, said in a news release. “Some places produce many more binary black holes than others. Our study takes these differences into careful account.”

Finding new areas of the universe

Immense stars fold into themselves to become black holes, like the pair LIGO found, are extremely uncommon, O’Shaughnessy said. They are less developed, “more primitive stars,” that appear in unique configurations in the universe. These stars are from the early universe and contain more pure hydrogen, which makes them massive. Conversely, younger generations of stars have eaten the remains of their forerunners containing heavy elements, which capped their growth.

“Because LIGO is so much more sensitive to these heavy black holes, these regions of pristine gas that make heavy black holes are extremely important,” O’Shaughnessy said. “These rare regions act like factories for building identifiable pairs of black holes.”

The new study found that enormous black holes rotate in a steady way, with orbits that stay in the same plane. The simulation indicates the alignment of these significant black holes is immune to the small kick that comes after the stars’ core collapse. The identical kick can knock the positioning of smaller black holes and bump their orbital plane.

O’Shaughnessy compared calculations in the study to a laboratory that could be used for evaluating future prospects in gravitational wave astronomy. Other gravitational wave scientists are now using the simulation in their own research as well.

“We’ve already seen that we can learn a lot about Einstein’s theory and massive stars, just from this one event,” O’Shaughnessy said. “LIGO is not going to see 1,000 black holes like these each year, but many of them will be even better and more exciting because we will have a better instrument—better glasses to view them with and better techniques.”

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Image credit: Credit: ESO/WFI (visible); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al. (microwave); NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al. (X-ray)

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