Astronomers have for the first time measured the speed and direction of a newborn black hole, thanks to gravitational waves produced as it bounced away from the site of its parent black holes’ merger. This first complete measurement of black hole recoil comes almost exactly a decade after the first detection of gravitational waves — tiny ripples in spacetime first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1915 — performed by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) on Sept. 14, 2015.
Over the last 10 years, a wealth of gravitational wave detections performed by LIGO and its collaboration gravitational wave detectors, Virgo, and Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA) have painted a more detailed picture of black hole mergers than ever before. However, one of the most fascinating and dramatic aspects of these mergers has remained “unheard” by these detectors that measure the ringing of spacetime caused by the universe’s most extreme events. That is the “kick” delivered to the daughter black hole birthed by these mergers.
This kick causes the newborn black hole to wail out gravitational waves in a preferred direction — an imbalance that causes it to speed away from the site of its birth, sometimes as fast as many millions of miles per hour. That is fast enough for the black hole to escape its home galaxy.
This uneven distribution of gravitational waves from black hole recoil should “sound” very different from regular gravitational waves emitted by black hole mergers as well as ripples in spacetime emitted as black holes in binaries spiral together.
The signal also differs based on the position an observer occupies relative to the black hole’s recoil. That differentiation allows scientists to look at the gravitational wave signal and determine the direction and speed of the kicked black hole.
“Black-hole mergers can be understood as a superposition of different signals, just like the music of an orchestra consistent with the combination of music played by many different instruments,” Juan Calderon-Bustillo, study team leader and a researcher tat the Instituto Galegode Físicade Altas Enerxías (IGFAE), said in a statement. “However, this orchestra is special: audiences located in different positions around it will record different combinations of instruments, which allows them to understand where exactly they are around it.”
Black hole scientists will get a kick out of this
To investigate the recoil of a newborn black…
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