5 ms·

'Wobbling black hole' most extreme example ever detected

56 points by wglb 4y ago

mannykannot 4y ago
Is this the same effect as seen in the precession of Mercury's perihelion?
- pdonis 4y ago
  From what I can gather, it's a much stronger example of the same general phenomenon, yes.
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    Explanation: https://aether.lbl.gov/www/classes/p10/gr/PrecessionperihelionMercury.htm https://aether.lbl.gov/www/classes/p10/gr/Precessionperiheli...
omgomgomgomg 4y ago
When they say wobble, by how much distance does the space aroubd it wobble? How would this feel on earth?
- seanw444 4y ago
  Now this I'm curious about.
holoduke 4y ago
A bit off topic, but I wonder how do researchers keep track of these discoveries. There are so many stars, galaxies, objects, that in 20 years from now there are billions of studies done on maybe just a few of them. How do you know not someone else already did extensive research on the object you study?
- antognini 4y ago
  There's a website called Simbad that keeps track of measurements and any publications that reference astronomical objects: http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/ http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/ Edit: For example, here is a list of articles that reference this event: http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-basic?Ident=GW200129_065458&submit=SIMBAD+search http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-basic?Ident=GW200129_0... (Currently only two papers are indexed.)
- ISL 4y ago
  It is hard. In a nearby field, I once spent a few months characterizing a high-precision mechanical high-vacuum pressure sensor, astounded that nobody else had done similar work many decades prior. Turns out I was missing a critical keyword from the early 1900s. All of the researchers in the field from ~1900-1940 used the term "manometer" to refer to even precision vacuum gauges. Once I had it, it unlocked a flood of references to top-notch work. The real key is a living corpus of scientific knowledge -- people you can ask and solid review papers. It is one of the superpowers of the very-experienced and the well-read to be able to know what has already been done. If something matters, it will generally get rediscovered in fairly short order. The biggest risk comes with measurements made that either can never be repeated (think changing bio-ethics rules or SN1987A) or can only be repeated at great cost (people are still analyzing high-energy physics experiments from the 1990s and earlier).
  - dweekly 4y ago
    There's a delightful insight here that I've seen in several different fields, which is not commonly taught in school: when trying to research a thing, first find out what other people have called that thing. When we were researching the possibility of having cell towers on solar planes or blimps, we had trouble locating other efforts to explore the same until we stumbled across the verbiage "High Altitude Platform Systems (HAPS)" and unlocked a wide body of research and people that had investigated exactly this. My best technique so far for doing this is to search in Google scholar for the plain English description of what I'm looking for, and then to go through the papers found to see the language and keywords used there. If I do another search with that keyword, do I find other papers talking about the same thing I'm talking about?
mlindner 4y ago
This article was rather light on details and didn't explain things very well. They don't tell how much the precession was, how it was detected, nor much else about it.
- antognini 4y ago
  The Nature paper says that the precession rate was about 3 Hz. In other words, the periapsis would circle around about 3 times per second. For comparison, the system with the next fastest precession is a binary pulsar system that has a precession rate of ~10^-10 Hz. So this is 10 orders of magnitude faster. This was determined by analyzing the gravitational radiation waveform from the merger. Properties of the system like the masses, spins, and their orientations all leave unique signatures in the gravitational radiation waveform. You can take a look at the original paper here (it's not very long): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05212-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05212-z
wwarner 4y ago
The paper on which the article was based. https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.11300 https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.11300
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Khrule 4y ago
It's the same way with particule physics there are still a lot of unknowns. We have alot of theories but we don't know enough to really explain all we see. Think how far we have came in particule physics. First they though protons and neutrons we're the smallest. Then they said the same thing about quarks then discovered other particules that made up quarks. Personally I like that ever time society this is they have figured the world or universe out we find we are just starting. That mystery amazes me. I did some study on black holes and while we know some aspects of the behavior they display we don't know it all yet.
ridgeguy 4y ago
The referenced article suggested there's an upper limit to the spin rate of a black hole. From the penultimate paragraph: "The larger black hole in this binary, which was about 40 times more massive than the Sun, was spinning almost as fast as physically possible." I don't get what limits black hole spin rate. As I understand it, The hole isn't a material surface, nor is there mass within, except for what's caused the singularity. Which might or might not be larger than a point. Can anybody clue me in as to whether there's an upper spin rate limit, and if so, why? Thanks.
- BreakfastB0b 4y ago
  This PBS Space Time video does a good job of explaining it https://youtu.be/1Z5fnwUmTSY https://youtu.be/1Z5fnwUmTSY. tl;dr the inner and outer event horizons of spinning black hole cancel out leaving a naked (ring) singularity which is believed to be prevented by the “Cosmic Censorship Hypothesis”. In the math it causes the event horizon radius to become complex which is believed to be “unphysical”. However maybe not, many “unphysical” mathematical objects have later turned out to be real such as black holes themselves (Einstein thought they were just a mathematical artefact) and anti matter (a result of negative roots of the Dirac Equation). Complex numbers are also an intrinsic part of the way Quantum Mechanics works, so perhaps there are naked singularities.
  - ace2358 4y ago
    Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Schrödinger equation isn’t the only mathematical treatment of the stochastic nature of quantum phenomena. I thought matrix mechanics was with real numbers and was mathematically equivalent. I also thought there were different statistical systems that included “negative” probabilities that can be used to describe wave packets without needing complex numbers. I do agree that sometimes the maths leads you to a truth in reality. Though sometimes it doesn’t. I’m not too familiar with QFT, does that require complex numbers?
    - codeflo 4y ago
      What do you mean by “require”? Complex numbers can be represented as a 2x2 matrix of real numbers (a scaled rotation around the origin), so transitively, that’s true for any equation involving complex numbers.
pklo 4y ago
There are only three detectors available (two LIGOs and VIRGO), and the strongest signal unfortunately also had an overlapping glitch, so there are still some data reduction issues that make interpretation difficult: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.11932.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.11932.pdf

56 points by wglb 4y ago

mannykannot 4y ago

Is this the same effect as seen in the precession of Mercury's perihelion?

pdonis 4y ago
From what I can gather, it's a much stronger example of the same general phenomenon, yes.
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  Explanation: https://aether.lbl.gov/www/classes/p10/gr/PrecessionperihelionMercury.htm https://aether.lbl.gov/www/classes/p10/gr/Precessionperiheli...

omgomgomgomg 4y ago

When they say wobble, by how much distance does the space aroubd it wobble? How would this feel on earth?

seanw444 4y ago
Now this I'm curious about.

holoduke 4y ago

A bit off topic, but I wonder how do researchers keep track of these discoveries. There are so many stars, galaxies, objects, that in 20 years from now there are billions of studies done on maybe just a few of them. How do you know not someone else already did extensive research on the object you study?

antognini 4y ago
There's a website called Simbad that keeps track of measurements and any publications that reference astronomical objects: http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/ http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/ Edit: For example, here is a list of articles that reference this event: http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-basic?Ident=GW200129_065458&submit=SIMBAD+search http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-basic?Ident=GW200129_0... (Currently only two papers are indexed.)
ISL 4y ago
It is hard. In a nearby field, I once spent a few months characterizing a high-precision mechanical high-vacuum pressure sensor, astounded that nobody else had done similar work many decades prior. Turns out I was missing a critical keyword from the early 1900s. All of the researchers in the field from ~1900-1940 used the term "manometer" to refer to even precision vacuum gauges. Once I had it, it unlocked a flood of references to top-notch work. The real key is a living corpus of scientific knowledge -- people you can ask and solid review papers. It is one of the superpowers of the very-experienced and the well-read to be able to know what has already been done. If something matters, it will generally get rediscovered in fairly short order. The biggest risk comes with measurements made that either can never be repeated (think changing bio-ethics rules or SN1987A) or can only be repeated at great cost (people are still analyzing high-energy physics experiments from the 1990s and earlier).
- dweekly 4y ago
  There's a delightful insight here that I've seen in several different fields, which is not commonly taught in school: when trying to research a thing, first find out what other people have called that thing. When we were researching the possibility of having cell towers on solar planes or blimps, we had trouble locating other efforts to explore the same until we stumbled across the verbiage "High Altitude Platform Systems (HAPS)" and unlocked a wide body of research and people that had investigated exactly this. My best technique so far for doing this is to search in Google scholar for the plain English description of what I'm looking for, and then to go through the papers found to see the language and keywords used there. If I do another search with that keyword, do I find other papers talking about the same thing I'm talking about?

mlindner 4y ago

This article was rather light on details and didn't explain things very well. They don't tell how much the precession was, how it was detected, nor much else about it.

antognini 4y ago
The Nature paper says that the precession rate was about 3 Hz. In other words, the periapsis would circle around about 3 times per second. For comparison, the system with the next fastest precession is a binary pulsar system that has a precession rate of ~10^-10 Hz. So this is 10 orders of magnitude faster. This was determined by analyzing the gravitational radiation waveform from the merger. Properties of the system like the masses, spins, and their orientations all leave unique signatures in the gravitational radiation waveform. You can take a look at the original paper here (it's not very long): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05212-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05212-z

wwarner 4y ago

The paper on which the article was based. https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.11300 https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.11300

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Khrule 4y ago

It's the same way with particule physics there are still a lot of unknowns. We have alot of theories but we don't know enough to really explain all we see. Think how far we have came in particule physics. First they though protons and neutrons we're the smallest. Then they said the same thing about quarks then discovered other particules that made up quarks. Personally I like that ever time society this is they have figured the world or universe out we find we are just starting. That mystery amazes me. I did some study on black holes and while we know some aspects of the behavior they display we don't know it all yet.

ridgeguy 4y ago

The referenced article suggested there's an upper limit to the spin rate of a black hole. From the penultimate paragraph: "The larger black hole in this binary, which was about 40 times more massive than the Sun, was spinning almost as fast as physically possible." I don't get what limits black hole spin rate. As I understand it, The hole isn't a material surface, nor is there mass within, except for what's caused the singularity. Which might or might not be larger than a point. Can anybody clue me in as to whether there's an upper spin rate limit, and if so, why? Thanks.

BreakfastB0b 4y ago
This PBS Space Time video does a good job of explaining it https://youtu.be/1Z5fnwUmTSY https://youtu.be/1Z5fnwUmTSY. tl;dr the inner and outer event horizons of spinning black hole cancel out leaving a naked (ring) singularity which is believed to be prevented by the “Cosmic Censorship Hypothesis”. In the math it causes the event horizon radius to become complex which is believed to be “unphysical”. However maybe not, many “unphysical” mathematical objects have later turned out to be real such as black holes themselves (Einstein thought they were just a mathematical artefact) and anti matter (a result of negative roots of the Dirac Equation). Complex numbers are also an intrinsic part of the way Quantum Mechanics works, so perhaps there are naked singularities.
- ace2358 4y ago
  Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Schrödinger equation isn’t the only mathematical treatment of the stochastic nature of quantum phenomena. I thought matrix mechanics was with real numbers and was mathematically equivalent. I also thought there were different statistical systems that included “negative” probabilities that can be used to describe wave packets without needing complex numbers. I do agree that sometimes the maths leads you to a truth in reality. Though sometimes it doesn’t. I’m not too familiar with QFT, does that require complex numbers?
  - codeflo 4y ago
    What do you mean by “require”? Complex numbers can be represented as a 2x2 matrix of real numbers (a scaled rotation around the origin), so transitively, that’s true for any equation involving complex numbers.

pklo 4y ago

There are only three detectors available (two LIGOs and VIRGO), and the strongest signal unfortunately also had an overlapping glitch, so there are still some data reduction issues that make interpretation difficult: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.11932.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.11932.pdf