Space gives up more secrets as scientists discover third wave
Space distorting gravitational waves, first predicted a century ago by Albert Einstein but never seen until two years ago, have been detected for a third time, scientists have said.
Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time, which carry information about violent events in the cosmos.
As with the first two cases, a team of researchers, including scientists from Sheffield University, detected the phenomenon while observing two black holes colliding to form a larger black hole.
Professor Ed Daw, from Sheffield, said: “Because black holes don’t emit light, we don’t know as much about them as we do about stars.”
Gravitational waves were first observed in September 2015 and the second detection occurred three months later.
According to the astronomers, the newly-formed black hole is 49 times the mass of the sun and is three billion light years away from earth.
The scientists believe their latest finding “provides clues about the directions in which the black holes are spinning”.
“Black holes are beautifully simple, you just need two numbers to describe them - how much they bend space-time, and how much space-time swirls about them,” said Dr Christopher Berry, of Birmingham University.
“But it takes lots of hard work to measure these from our data. We are now starting to uncover details about the spins of these black holes, which could reveal hints about how they formed.”