Third gravitational wave detection offers new insight into black holes

It's possible that this is a binary system of black holes formed in the early Universe that contributes significantly to the dark matter in the cosmos. An international team of researchers has made a third detection of gravitational waves, ripples in space and time, in a discovery that provides new insights into the mysterious nature of black holes and, potentially, dark matter. On 4 January this year, the team intercepted the minute gravitational waves from a binary black hole system three billion light years away undergoing its final death throes to form a larger black hole about 50 times the mass of the Sun. The research is published in Physical Review Letters. ANU is one of the leading Australian institutions supporting the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) project. Professor Susan Scott from the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering (RSPE) said the discovery provided the first evidence that black holes in binary systems may not be aligned. "This means that the two black holes could be spinning in opposite directions, which provides a tantalising clue as to how the binary system may have formed," said Professor Scott, who is also a Chief Investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav).