So far since the first detection of a black hole merger in 2015, all the gravitational waves that had been detected by us seemed to have created by merging black holes of almost equal masses.
But for the first time, LIGO and Virgo have detected what seems to be a signal from Binary Black Hole merger of unequal masses. The signal, GW190412 first detected on April 12, 2019, by the Advanced Virgo and the 2 advanced LIGO detectors were announced by this collaboration recently on April 18, 2020. One of these black hole being 3.6 times heavier than the other seemed to have a mass around 30 times of our Sun while the latter having mass 8 times of Sun. We have seen many black holes merging since the detection of the first-ever gravitational wave but this is the first time one of the binaries being nearly 4 times the mass of other. Though the difference it showed from a regular black hole merger(BBH) of equal mass system is subtle, we were able to differentiate and tell that it happened about 2 billion light-years away from us. The harmonics produced by these gravitational waves were as predicted earlier by Einstein’s relativity theory for the case of unequal masses which validates his theory one more time.
–Vivek Karunakaran
Credits: LIGO, Virgo
References:
https://ligo.org/detections/GW190412.php
https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/LA/news/ligo20200420
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