On May 21, 2019, at a distance of 7 billion light years away, our tow wave detectors were devastated by the biggest disaster yet. From an examination of the signal, astronomers concluded that they were discovered as a result of two black holes breaking together, with inward pressures at 66 and 85 times the mass of the sun.
But what if it was something else? A new study offers a different interpretation of the event. It is possible, according to an international team of astronomers, that the two were not black holes at all, but mysterious, theoretical objects called boson stars – which could be made up of these candidates. -accessible for dark matter.
The traction wave event, known as GW 190521, was a remarkable discovery. The result of the union of the two would have been a black hole at about 142 times the mass of the sun – within the intermediate mass range a black hole has never been found before, to the the high mass gap is called the black hole.
That was nice, but there was a big puzzle – the black hole of 85 sunsets said to have been involved in the crash. According to our models, black holes over about 65 masses of sunlight cannot come from a single star, like large stellar black holes.
That’s because the supernatural stars that would produce a black hole in this mass range are so large that their supernovae – known as pair instability supernovae – should completely destroy the stellar heart. , leaving nothing behind that could fall into a black hole.
While our understanding of the formation of ‘twin’ stars does not allow pairs of stellar black holes to be close enough to fit together, the definition of two smaller black holes does seem to coincide. . But if we go with the data alone, another model will respond even better.
The black hole between two smaller black holes may have been the result of an earlier union, the black hole being the result of an earlier union between two smaller black holes. Led by Juan Calderón Bustillo of the Galician Institute of High Energy Physics in Spain, the research team has proven that boson stars would be a perfect match for the numbers.
“Our results show that both scenarios are almost recognizable because of the data, although the exotic boson star hypothesis is slightly better,” said astronomer José Font of the University of Valencia, Spain.
“This is very interesting, because our boson star model, as it is now, is very limited, and subject to major improvements. A more developed model could lead to even more evidence for this situation and will allow us to study the gravitational pre- wave views under the guise of a boson star union. “
At the moment, Boson stars are just theoretical, and have never been discovered before, but astronomers are more interested, especially in finding a dark subject.
They, like black holes, are predictable by general relevance, and can grow to millions of solar masses at a very complex size.
As we have reported before, where stars are usually made up of particles called fermions – protons, neutrons, electrons, the material that is the most substantial part of our Universe – boson stars would be on made up entirely of bosons. These grains – including photons, gluons and the famous Higgs boson – do not follow the same physical rules as fermions.
Fountains are subject to the Pauli principle of prohibition, which means that you cannot have two or more springs with the same quantum states, which include the place in which they sit. But Bosons can be taken over; when they come together, they act as one big wave or subject. We know this, because it was made in a laboratory, producing something called Bose-Einstein condensate.
For boson stars, the particles can be pushed into a space that can be defined by specific values, or points on a scale. With the right type of bosons in the right configurations, this ‘scattered field’ could be in a relatively stable configuration.
Boson stars may look very similar to black holes, except for one feature: they do not have a absorbent surface that would block photons, or an event horizon, so they would appear completely visible. They are basically the tight knots of Bose-Einstein converging in space.
Ironically the innumerable particles that make up such large stars have to be incredibly light, with millions of times less mass than electricity.
Interestingly, this type of ultralight boson would also be a candidate for a dark matter – the unknown, invisible mass that is responsible for all the extra weight that floats around the Universe that we cannot to describe. So the discovery of boson stars would at least slightly address one of the greatest mysteries of the cosmos.
According to the team ‘s calculations, if GW 190521 were a union between two boson stars, the masses and distances would be different, but it would solve the problem of that 85 – degree black hole.
“First of all, we wouldn’t talk about hitting black holes anymore, which eliminates the issue of dealing with a‘ forbidden ’black hole,” Calderón Bustillo said.
“Second, because boson star unions are much weaker, we are finding a distance much closer than the one estimated by LIGO and Virgo. This leads to a much larger mass for the black hole. finally, of about 250 solar masses, so the fact that we’ve seen them form a medium-sized black hole remains true. “
In the team’s situation, when the two stars hit a boson, they created a larger boson star that may have become unstable and fallen into a black hole, so it is impossible to tell the boson star ‘s definition is correct, even if we see it it’s clearly over the revised 1.9 billion-year light speed.
Instead, the analysis provides us with the tools for studying the occurrences of mass waves occurring in the context of boson stars as well as black holes, with the hope of finding answers in the future.
“If it is confirmed by subsequent analysis of this and other gravitational waves,” said astronomer Carlos Herdeiro of the University of Aveiro in Spain, “our result would provide the first speculative evidence for a desired dark subject candidate. a long time ago. “
The research was published in Corporate Review Letters.