Daily Galaxy reports: "The weirdness of the LIGO discovery" --The detection of gravitational waves created by the merger of two 30-solar-mass black holes (image below) had astronomers asking just how common are black holes of this size, and how often do they merge?If so, could this be the missing dark matter?
After conducting a cosmic inventory of sorts to calculate and categorize stellar-remnant black holes, astronomers from the University of California, Irvine led by UCI chair and professor of physics & astronomy James Bullock, concluded that there are probably tens of millions of the enigmatic, dark objects in the Milky Way – far more than expected.
“We think we’ve shown that there are as many as 100 million black holes in our galaxy,” said Bullock, co-author of the research paper in the current issue of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The other big LIGO discovery is that most of the heavy elements like gold on Earth came from neutron star collisions. That is what some people think, anyway.
I am not sure I believe all this, but we should soon have more observations and confirmations. We have a European LIGO, altho it did not see the neutron star collision.
No comments:
Post a Comment