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Increase / An illustration of a swarm of small black holes in a disk of gas orbiting a giant black hole.

J. Samsing/Niels Bohr Institute

In 2019, the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration recorded a gravitational wave signal from a black hole merger, which turned out to be one of the most record-breaking. Named “GW190521”, it was the most massive and farthest ever discovered and produced the most powerful signal ever found, and appeared in the data as a “burst” rather than the usual “chirping”.

In addition, the resulting new black hole was about 150 times as massive as our Sun, making GW190521 the first direct observation of an intermediate-mass black hole. Stranger still, the two merged black holes were in elliptical (rather than circular) orbits, and their spin axes were tilted much more than usual relative to those orbits.

Physicists love nothing more than to be confronted with an intriguing mystery that doesn’t seem to immediately fit into established theory, and GW190521 gave them just that. New theoretical modeling suggests that all of these bizarre aspects can be explained by the presence of a single third black hole in the last dance of the binary system, creating a “chaotic tango”. new document published in the journal Nature.

Like us previously reportedOn May 21, 2019, the Collaboration’s detectors detected the tell-tale signal of a binary black hole merger: four short oscillations lasting less than a tenth of a second. The shorter the signal, the more massive the merging black holes—in this case, 85 and 66 solar masses, respectively. The black holes merged into a new, even larger black hole with a mass of about 142 solar masses, releasing energy equivalent to 8 solar masses, hence the strong signal picked up by the detectors.

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What made this event so unusual is that the measurement of 142 solar masses falls right in the middle of the so-called “mass gap” for black holes. Most of these objects belong to two groups: stellar-mass black holes (ranging from a few solar masses to tens of solar masses) and supermassive black holes like the one at the center of our Milky Way galaxy (hundreds of thousands to billions of solar masses). The first are the result of the death of massive stars as a result of the collapse of the core of a supernova, while the formation of the second remains a mystery.

Increase / The hierarchical scheme of black holes merging as seen by the artist. Scientists speculate that the two black holes themselves were the result of an earlier merger between two smaller black holes.

LIGO/Caltech/MIT/R. wounded (IPAC)

The fact that one of the progenitor black holes weighs 85 solar masses is also highly unusual and contradicts current models of stellar evolution. The types of stars that would produce black holes with masses between 65 and 135 solar masses would not go supernova and therefore would not become black holes. On the contrary, these stars would become unstable and would lose a significant portion of their mass. Only then will they go supernova, but the result will be a black hole with a mass of less than 65 solar masses.