by Charles Mudede • Mar 5, 2021 at 10:00 am
Shall we shake the universe? brightstars/gettyimages.com
In the previous decade, there were only two major events in the science of physics. One was the detection of the Higgs boson by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in 2012. (The particle was needed to explain why particles have mass.) The other big event occurred in our very own (radioactive) backyard, at Hanford s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO).
This mean machine (lasers, vacuums, mirrors), along with another one in the woods of Louisiana, can transform into sound the gravitational waves predicted in a mathematical model Albert Einstein formulated a decade after his special relativity. The cosmic ear of LIGO heard this small ripple across the medium of spacetime as a chirp in 2016.
Eerie Stars of Dark Matter May Be Behind Largest Gravitational Wave Detection Yet
2 MARCH 2021
On 21 May 2019, from a distance of 7 billion light-years away, our gravitational wave detectors were rocked by the most massive collision yet. From analysis of the signal, astronomers concluded that the detection was the result of two black holes smashing together, weighing in at 66 and 85 times the mass of the Sun respectively.
But what if it was something else? A new study offers a different interpretation of the event. It s possible, according to an international team of astrophysicists, that the two objects were not black holes at all, but mysterious, theoretical objects called boson stars - potentially made up of elusive candidates for dark matter.