“Researchers up until now have theorized the formation and existence for pairs of black holes in the universe, but the origins of their predecessors, stars, still remains a mystery,” said LIGO and Vanderbilt University astrophysicist, Karan Jani and co-author Avi Loeb at Harvard University about a new study that leveraged Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which tells us how black holes interact and eventually collide, using LIGO data to take an inventory of the universe’s time and space resources at any given point.
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“According to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, nothing can escape from the gravity of a black hole once it has passed a point of no return, known as the event horizon,” explained Niayesh Afshordi, a physics and astronomy professor at Waterloo about echoes in gravitational wave signals that hint that the event horizon of a black hole may be more complicated than scientists currently think based on research reporting the first tentative detection of these echoes, caused by a microscopic quantum “fuzz” that surrounds newly formed black holes. “This was scientists’ understanding for a long time until Stephen Hawking used quantum mechanics to predict that quantum particles will slowly leak out of black holes, which we now call Hawking radiation.
