India helps detect: Biggest black hole crash; signal found, 240 times heavier than sun
Indian scientists - Archana Pai, Koustav Chandra and a team led by M K Haris - played a central role in the landmark discovery of this event, dubbed 'GW231123'.
The discovery was announced on Monday by the global LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) network - an international team of scientists whose mission is to detect tiny ripples in spacetime triggered by powerful cosmic events, such as black hole collisions.
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LVK comprises three gravitational-wave detectors - LIGO in the United States, Virgo in Italy, and KAGRA in Japan.
GR231123 was discovered by LIGO Hanford in Richmond (Washington) and LIGO Livingston (Los Angeles) on Nov 23, 2023.
The event involved two massive black holes, one measuring 103 times the mass of the Sun and the other, 137 solar masses. The result was a binary black hole the mass of which is 240 times that of the Sun. Furthermore, Pai, principal investigator of the LIGO-India Scientific Collaboration (LISC), said black holes were spinning at a rate six lakh times faster than the earth's rotation.
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"GW231123 is the heaviest and highly spinning binary black hole system detected to date," she said.
Black holes this large and fast-spinning aren't supposed to exist - at least not according to our current understanding of how stars evolve.
Chandra, who completed his PhD at IIT Bombay and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Pennsylvania State University, helped study and make sense of the GW231123 signal, wrote up the findings, and figured out what the final part of the signal tells us after the black holes merged.
He also helped write the main scientific paper. Haris and his team from IIT Calicut checked if the signal behaved exactly as Einstein's theory of gravity predicted - and so far, it seems to match.
"This signal, just a tenth of a second long, was a real puzzle at first," Chandra said. It matched the waveform of emerging black holes, as predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity.
"We realised that we may have, for the first time, witnessed the collision of two intermediate-mass black holes.
Chandra said it could be years before scientists are able to uncover the true origin of the gravitational wave and extracting all data from it.
India participates in global gravitational wave astronomy via LISC, which currently comprises 17 academic institutions across India. IIT Bombay specialises in short-duration transient searches, including intermediate-mass black holes in the LIGO-Virgo data.
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