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August 31, 2019 07:34 pm

Scientists Excited By Discovery of an Impossibly Large Black Hole

In 2017 several scientists co-signed a wager at the Aspen Center for Physics that a black hole wouldn't be discovered between 55 and 130 solar masses. They may have lost, reports the Atlantic:Black-hole physicists have been excitedly discussing reports that the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave detectors recently picked up the signal of an unexpectedly enormous black hole, one with a mass that was thought to be physically impossible. "The prediction is no black holes, not even a few" in this mass range, wrote Stan Woosley, an astrophysicist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, in an email. "But of course we know nature often finds a way...." Whereas most of the colliding black holes that wiggle LIGO's and Virgo's instruments probably originated as pairs of isolated stars (binary star systems being common in the cosmos), MIT's Carl Rodriguez and his co-signers argued that a fraction of the detected collisions occur in dense stellar environments such as globular clusters. The black holes swing around in one another's gravity, and sometimes they catch one another and merge, like big fish swallowing smaller ones in a pond. Inside a globular cluster, a 50-solar-mass black hole could merge with a 30-solar-mass one, for instance, and then the resulting giant could merge again. This second-generation merger is what LIGO/Virgo might have detected -- "a lucky catch of the big fish in the pond.

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