Highly Eccentric Black Hole Merger Detected for the First Time - SciTechDaily

January 24, 2022.

An artist’s impression of two black holes about to collide and merge.

For the first time, scientists believe they have detected a merger of two black holes with eccentric orbits.

According to a paper published in Nature Astronomy by researchers from Rochester Institute of Technology’s Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation and the University of Florida, this can help explain how some of the black hole mergers detected by LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration are much heavier than previously thought possible.

The scientists studied the most massive gravitational wave binary observed to date, GW190521, to determine if the merger had eccentric orbits.

“This makes an interesting case to study as a second generation binary black hole system and opens up to new possibilities of formation scenarios of black holes in dense star clusters.”.

Artist’s impression of binary black holes about to collide.

(astrophysical sciences and technology), Professor and CCRG Director Manuela Campanelli, Associate Professor Richard O’Shaughnessy, and collaborators from the University of Florida formed to give a fresh look at the data to see if the black holes had highly eccentric orbits before they merged.

An extension of this analysis by the same RIT and UFL team used a possible electromagnetic counterpart observed by the Zwicky Transient Facility to compute independently the cosmological Hubble constant with GW150521 as an eccentric binary black hole merger.

O’Shaughnessy, 20 January 2022, Nature Astronomy.

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