"Echo" of gravitational waves may confirm Hawking's hypothesis about black holes

"Echo" of gravitational waves may confirm Hawking's hypothesis about black holes
"Echo" of gravitational waves may confirm Hawking's hypothesis about black holes
Anonim

The gravitational wave "echo" indicates that the black hole's event horizon may be more complex than scientists currently believe.

A study by a team of authors from the University of Waterloo, Canada, reports the first possible detection of these echoes associated with a microscopic quantum "gun" surrounding young black holes.

Gravitational waves are the ripples in spacetime caused by collisions between massive space objects such as black holes or neutron stars.

"According to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, nothing can leave the vicinity of a black hole after passing the point of no return known as the event horizon," explained Niayesh Afshordi, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo. “This is what scientists thought for a long time, until Stephen Hawking predicted, using quantum mechanics, that quantum particles would slowly leave a black hole as part of what is now called Hawking radiation.

In their study, Afshordi and his colleague Jahed Abedi of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Germany, report the first possible detection of "echoes" formed by the reflection of gravitational waves from a quantum "gun." Scientists note that as of today, these findings require further confirmation, but their main value lies in the fact that they rather specifically define the scheme of all subsequent experimental tests in this direction.

This study used data from gravitational-wave observations of the collision event between neutron stars, carried out in 2017 using the LIGO / Virgo detectors. Scientists have compared the "echo" signals in these observational data with modern theoretical models of a quantum "gun" around black holes and found good agreement.

The study was published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics last November and won the Buchalter Prize for Cosmological Discoveries this month.

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