Astronomers Unravelling the Puzzle of Merging Black Holes

Credit: NASA

A new paper, published in Nature Communications, describes the results of an investigation into the formation of gravitational-wave sources with a newly developed toolkit named COMPAS (Compact Object Mergers: Population Astrophysics and Statistics).

In order for the black holes to merge within the age of the Universe by emitting gravitational waves, they must start out very close together by astronomical standards, no more than about a fifth of the distance between the Earth and the Sun. However, massive stars, which are the progenitors of the black holes that LIGO has observed, expand to be much larger than this in the course of their evolution. The key challenge, then, is how to fit such large stars within a very small orbit. Several possible scenarios have been proposed to address this.

Gravitational radiation has been directly detected.

 

The first-ever detection was made by both facilities of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Washington and Louisiana simultaneously last September.

Illustration Credit: LIGO, NSF, Aurore Simonnet (Sonoma State U.)

The Birmingham astrophysicists, joined by collaborator Professor Selma de Mink from the University of Amsterdam, have shown that all three observed events can be formed via the same formation channel: isolated binary evolution via a common-envelope phase.

In this channel, two massive progenitor stars start out at quite wide separations. The stars interact as they expand, engaging in several episodes of mass transfer. The latest of these is typically a common envelope – a very rapid, dynamically unstable mass transfer that envelops both stellar cores in a dense cloud of hydrogen gas. Ejecting this gas from the system takes energy away from the orbit. This brings the two stars sufficiently close together for gravitational-wave emission to be efficient, right at the time when they are small enough that such closeness will no longer put them into contact.

The whole process takes a few million years to form two black holes, with a possible subsequent delay of billions of years before the black holes merge and form a single black hole.

Frame from a simulation of the merger of two black holes and the resulting emission of gravitational radiation (colored fields). The outer red sheets correspond directly to the outgoing gravitational radiation that one day may be detected by gravitational-wave observatories.

Credit: NASA/C. Henze

The simulations have also helped the team to understand the typical properties of the stars that can go on to form such pairs of merging black holes and the environments where this can happen. For example, the team concluded that a merger of two black holes with significantly unequal masses would be a strong indication that the stars formed almost entirely from hydrogen and helium, with other elements contributing fewer than 0.1% of stellar matter (for comparison, this fraction is about 2% in the Sun).

First author Simon Stevenson, a PhD student at the University of Birmingham, explained: “The beauty of COMPAS is that it allows us to combine all of our observations and start piecing together the puzzle of how these black holes merge, sending these ripples in spacetime that we were able to observe at LIGO.”

Senior author Professor Ilya Mandel added: “This work makes it possible to pursue a kind of ‘palaeontology’ for gravitational waves. A palaeontologist, who has never seen a living dinosaur, can figure out how the dinosaur looked and lived from its skeletal remains. In a similar way, we can analyse the mergers of black holes, and use these observations to figure out how those stars interacted during their brief but intense lives.”

 

 

Contacts and sources: 

Liz Bell

University of Birmingham