5 ms·
Way to headline. The numbers in the article suggest a violation of conservation of mass: > Today, the LIGO Collaboration announced the detection of the most c
by thaumasiotes 1y ago
Way to headline.
The numbers in the article suggest a violation of conservation of mass:
> Today, the LIGO Collaboration announced the detection of the most colossal black hole merger known to date, the final product of which appears to be a gigantic black hole more than 225 times the mass of the Sun.
> GW231123, first observed on November 23, 2023, seems to be an unprecedented beast of a black hole merger. Two enormous black holes—137 and 103 times the mass of the Sun—managed to keep it together despite their immense combined mass
Is the explanation here "225 is a nice round number, and 240 is technically 'more than' that", or "a lot of mass evaporates into other forms of energy when black holes merge", or "during a merge, it becomes possible for matter to escape an event horizon", or what?
- jraines 1y agothe extra mass is converted into energy in the form of gravitational waves (maybe other forms too idk but this is part of it)
- maxbond 1y agoEntire solar masses being lost to gravitational waves, like the voltage drop across a resistor, is a humbling prospect.
- bot403 1y agoI'll underscore your awe by reminding you those solar masses disappeared in only 1 tenth of a second - the length of the gravitational wave signal.
- ikari_pl 1y agobut that's the time that passed here... it sounds like a mind-warpingly different perspective might have been seen there
- IAmBroom 1y agoI think you have it backwards. From the POV of someone near the Event Horizon, other space speeds up. Galaxies begin to spin at noticeable speeds.... But the black holes would appear to be approaching each other at "normal" speeds.
- Bluestein 1y agoDang
- nine_k 1y agoI suppose nothing but gravitational waves can escape the even horizon — or, rather, gravitational waves are born near / around it, because the black holes bend the space enormously. OTOH whatever else may be outside the black holes near the merger and count towards their mass for astronomical purposes, such as accretion discs, should be much lighter weight than what's inside the event horizon.
- ars 1y agoGravitational waves also can not escape. Those waves carry energy, and it's actually energy that can't escape. The waves are actually made just to the outside of the event horizon.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago> The waves are actually made just to the outside of the event horizon. How do we feel about this vis-a-vis action-at-a-distance?
- ars 1y agoGravity does action at a distance. That's its thing. The reason these waves are not generated from inside the black hole is that, to us, time stops there. For example these black hole mergers aren't actually merging, they are getting closer, and then they time dilate out of existence.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago> Gravity does action at a distance. That's its thing. Why does it need to travel in waves at the speed of light? If one mass moves, a distant mass is unaffected until the information reaches it. That's the opposite of action at a distance.
- ars 1y agoYour question is confusing. Action at a distance does not imply going faster than light, it means there is some sort of field connecting the two things.
- david38 1y agoRather confused. 225 solar masses isn’t gigantic by any means
- NooneAtAll3 1y agoit's above what's considered possible to create by usual star collapse means https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_massive_stars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_massive_stars lists only 2 stars more massive than that
- thaumasiotes 1y agoSo if you have two black holes within each other's event horizons, but they're too big to collide, what's supposed to happen instead?
- pfdietz 1y agoThe situation you describe is impossible. "If you have a very large positive number that is less than zero, what happens?"
- thaumasiotes 1y agoWhat's the contradiction in the black hole setup?
- naasking 1y agoI'm not even sure what it would mean for two black holes to be too big to collide, or where that became some kind of constraint.
- dskloet 1y agoI thought it was just thought that it would take too long for them to spiral into each other for it to have happened enough times in our universe