{"id":134197,"date":"2025-09-10T16:59:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T16:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/134197\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T16:59:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T16:59:10","slug":"colliding-black-holes-ringing-across-space-and-time-prove-hawking-einstein-theories-right-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/134197\/","title":{"rendered":"Colliding black holes ‘ringing’ across space and time prove Hawking, Einstein theories right"},"content":{"rendered":"

Once again, it turns out that renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking was right. Oh, and Albert Einstein, too.<\/p>\n

Scientists from the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detected a gravitational wave, a ripple in space-time that is caused by extremely energetic processes, such as the merger of two black holes or two dense neutron stars colliding.<\/p>\n

It turns out that the gravitational wave occurred due to\u00a0two black holes roughly 1.3 billion light years away from Earth, with masses roughly 30 times that of our sun, colliding and forming another black hole, with the designation GW250114.<\/p>\n

This isn’t unusual for the LIGO detectors<\/a>, one located\u00a0in Hanford, Wash.,\u00a0the other\u00a0in Livingston, La., which have found close to 300 of these violent interactions. But this time, the researchers were able to learn a lot more than they have before.<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/p>\n

Two four-kilometre long arms of the LIGO Hanford observatory. (LIGO\/Caltech\/MIT)<\/p>\n

Predictions<\/p>\n

The merger of these particular\u00a0black holes created what\u00a0scientists refer to as a “ringing,” which produced two different tones, allowing researchers to confirm that a black hole can be defined using only two properties: mass and spin, something that was\u00a0predicted by mathematician Roy Kerr in 1963.<\/p>\n

“One of the predicted qualities that’s unique to a black hole, is that \u2026\u00a0sort of like\u00a0if you hit a tuning fork, it would ring at particular frequencies, and they’d have particular spacing,” said\u00a0Jess McIver, one of the study’s co-authors, who is also an associate professor at the University of British Columbia.<\/p>\n

“It’s sort of like a fingerprint\u00a0of a black hole. So because this was so loud, such a gorgeous, loud signal, we were able to really crisply resolve those.”<\/p>\n

Max Isi, an assistant professor at Columbia University, and also a co-author of the study, published in the journal Physical Review Letters<\/a>, explained it further.<\/p>\n

“There are two individual modes of oscillations, two tones: a fundamental tone and an overtone,” he said.<\/p>\n

Because the tones matched, he says, it proves the Kerr solution. Had\u00a0the tones been different, it would imply that other properties are\u00a0necessary to describe a black hole.<\/p>\n

This proved both Kerr and Einstein right about their predictions for black holes. Einstein’s\u00a0theory of general relativity predicted the existence of black holes.\u00a0And in\u00a0Kerr’s case,\u00a0his calculations specifically\u00a0centred around\u00a0spinning black holes.<\/p>\n

The Hawking area theorem<\/p>\n

The merger also confirmed Hawking’s area theorem,\u00a0which states that when two black holes merge, the event horizon \u2014 or the area around the black hole\u00a0from which no light or radiation\u00a0can escape \u2014 can never decrease, only increase.<\/p>\n

After the two black holes\u00a0merged, the scientists were able to use the ringing to determine the final size of the event horizon \u2014 also considered the black hole’s surface area.\u00a0Before they merged, each black hole had a surface area of roughly 240,000 square kilometres. After, the new black hole had a surface area of 400,000 square kilometres, proving Hawking correct.<\/p>\n

\"When<\/p>\n

When two black holes collide and merge, they release gravitational waves, seen in this illustration as ripples. These waves can be detected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA detectors on Earth, allowing scientists to determine the mass and spin of the black holes. The clearest black hole merger signal yet, named GW250114, recorded by LIGO in January 2025, offers new insights into these mysterious cosmic giants. (Maggie Chiang for Simons Foundation)<\/p>\n

“I imagine that for Hawking,\u00a0black holes and space and time have been studied as theoretical mathematical abstractions for decades. And finally, being able to see these processes taking place, you know, it’s astounding,” Isi said.<\/p>\n

“I mean, it’s astounding to me, and I can’t imagine to him, you know, having worked his whole\u00a0life on this. So it’s unfortunate that we couldn’t do this while he was alive.”<\/p>\n

Now, while the surface area increased, the mass of the black hole actually decreased, which is what theory suggests should happen.<\/p>\n

“The area of the event horizon, it can only grow,” said Janna Levin, a theoretical astrophysicist and professor of physics and astronomy at Columbia University’s Barnard College, who was not involved in the research.<\/p>\n

“And\u00a0if I was thinking of it as one original black hole absorbing another, it could only grow, but its mass is not the sum of the two masses.\u00a0It’s actually less. It loses some of that E=MC\u00b2\u00a0energy into the gravitational waves.”<\/p>\n

Each black hole was roughly 33 times the mass of the sun.\u00a0After the merger, the black hole\u00a0had a mass 63 times that of the sun.<\/p>\n

WATCH | A look at what happened when scientists detected gravitational waves:<\/p>\n

Really far, but really loud<\/p>\n

A similar analysis of an almost identical black hole merger\u00a0\u2014 the very first one was detected in 2015<\/a> \u2014 was done in 2021. However, it did not yield the same strong evidence that this new analysis did.<\/p>\n

Isi explained that because the signal for that black hole was weaker, scientists were still left guessing, but that the\u00a0signal for the recent merger was\u00a0four times stronger.<\/p>\n

“You can see that 2021 paper as a demonstration that something like this would be possible, like a proof of principle,” he said, adding that this merger was “real, incontrovertible” evidence of it.<\/p>\n

The 2015 detection of a gravitational wave earned the researchers the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017, as part of the LIGO-VIRGO collaboration. Today, there are more\u00a0observatories detecting gravitational waves, including one in Japan, that make up the LIGO-VIRGO-KAGRA collaboration.<\/p>\n

Both McIver and Isi are excited about what future improvements to the detectors will help them discover.<\/p>\n

McIver says that no\u00a0matter how many times scientists “slice and dice this data in different ways”\u00a0to check the signal against what Einstein, Kerr and Hawking predicted, the answer is that they were right.<\/p>\n

“As the detectors continue to improve, our confidence will improve, or potentially we’ll uncover something really interesting that we’re not expecting.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Once again, it turns out that renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking was right. Oh, and Albert Einstein, too.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":134198,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[2037,2035,49,48,73082,71,73083,66,46454],"class_list":{"0":"post-134197","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-albert-einstein","9":"tag-black-holes","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-canada","12":"tag-gravitational-wave","13":"tag-ligo","14":"tag-roy-kerr","15":"tag-science","16":"tag-stephen-hawking"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134197\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/134198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}