Wobble (10/13/22)

Happy Thursday. I hope you're having a great week so far. If a new discovery in black hole science would make it even better, well, you're in luck.

Did someone forward you this email? Subscribe to Parallax here.

Wobble wobble

Has Einstein ever been wrong?

A study published yesterday in Nature revealed the first direct observation of a phenomenon that the famed physicist described in his theory of gravity. In a mid-collision pair of black holes, the Cardiff University researchers found the strongest evidence yet of a wobbling orbit caused by the distortion of space and time. 

Of the pair of black holes found locked in this cosmic dance, one struck the research team as unusual in its initial analysis. It’s about 40 times as massive as the Sun. It’s also spinning really, really fast—in fact, “maybe even as fast as physically possible according to our current understanding of physics,” Mark Hannam told Parallax. Hannam is a professor at Cardiff University’s Gravity Exploration Institute and lead author on the paper. 

This rapid spin produces an effect in the black hole’s orbit that looks something like what happens to a spinning top when it’s knocked off-kilter. The whole plane of the binary black hole's orbit begins to wobble, conserving angular momentum in the system—a phenomenon called precession.

Precession in a single object is well-documented (for example, Earth’s orbit precesses). We’ve even observed binary precession on a smaller scale in the orbits of binary neutron stars. But in those observations, the stars were farther apart and spinning more slowly, so it took ~300 years for the system to precess once.

“With the black holes, because they're orbiting so close [together], and they're going so fast, and they're spinning much more rapidly, the effect is billions of times stronger,” Hannam said. “So these things actually precess a couple of times every second rather than taking hundreds of years.”

Scouring the sky 

In remote pockets of Washington, Louisiana, and Italy are a set of massive instruments with arms up to four kilometers long, designed to search for subtle signals from massive, faraway celestial bodies. These instruments, the LIGO and Virgo detectors, search for gravitational waves, another component essential to—yep, you guessed it—Einstein’s theory of gravity.

The first gravitational waves were detected in 2015. In 2017, the discovery won researchers Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish, and Kip S. Thorne the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Since then, it’s been a waterfall effect of discovery after discovery.

“One day, binary black holes were just inconceivable,” Hannam said. “A couple of years later, it’s ‘Another binary black hole, whatever.’ And so now the excitement is in pulling out these features that we hadn't seen yet.”

The LIGO and Virgo detectors have been shut down since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, and they’re currently being upgraded. When they’re switched back on, they’ll be far more sensitive than before, paving the way for bouts of new research and discoveries.

“The thing now really is in getting…hundreds and hundreds of signals, so we can do statistics to really understand the population of black holes in the universe,” Hannam said. “That tells us how they formed and then that, in turn, feeds into information about how galaxies form.”

Sponsored

Solve Your Space Recruiting Needs

Temporary contractors or permanent recruitment needs? 

Axia Recruitment and Axia Space save their partners time and stress through a seamless recruitment process. Axia appreciates that work impacts every aspect of life. This is why they exist to ensure optimum fit, access to growth and positive cultural impact through tailored recruitment.

Shared success with a positive on flow is the best kind of success! Axia specializes in recruiting Engineers, Business & Project Support Professionals and IT/Cyber and AI candidates within the Aerospace, Space and Fintech industries in Australia, USA and UK.

Please reach out if you are looking for recruitment assistance or temporary contractors for your business.

Use code "Spaceload" to get a 30% discount on your recruiting needs. 

Other News from the Cosmos

• CAPSTONE, the pathfinding mission tracing out a unique lunar orbit for the planned Gateway station, is once again stable. The craft had been tumbling for more than a month when the NASA and Advanced Space team recovered it.

• DART’s impact on the asteroid Dimorphos shortened the asteroid’s orbital period by a whopping 32 minutes. For context, the threshold for mission success was 73 seconds.

• China launched the Advanced Space-based Solar Observatory (ASO-S), which will study activity in the Sun’s magnetic field.

• NSF plans to shut down the Arecibo Observatory on Sept. 30, 2023.

• JPL successfully tested a prototype of a robotic balloon designed for future missions to Venus.

• Barium has been found in the upper atmospheres of the exoplanets WASP-76 b and WASP-121 b, two ultra-hot gas giants. The significance? Barium is the heaviest element ever found in an exoplanet’s atmosphere.

• Duke researchers developed a new material for aerospace applications: A class of carbides with plasmonic properties—i.e. the ability to trap light energy from oscillating electrons—able to withstand temperatures up to 7,000°F. 

• University of Gothenburg researchers identified a way that oxygen can be created in the absence of biological processes.

• Blue Skies Space announced plans to launch Mauve, a satellite that will monitor the stellar flare activity of a set of nearby stars.

Rachael's Recs

🌌 Can’t get enough of black holes? I know I can’t. This story from Dennis Overbye for the NYT dives further into the tension between two of Einstein’s own ideas—general relativity and quantum mechanics. The piece details the decades of scientific exploration that scientists have dedicated to resolving the contradictions between the two concepts, with the mystery of the black hole at the center.

🧊 Mooning over Europa: Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter, has long been an intriguing subject for planetary scientists because of its potential for life. The planned Europa Clipper mission, slated for launch in 2024, will investigate the moon’s many mysteries. One of those mysteries, NASA predicts, is that shallow lakes inside Europa’s icy crust could be prone to erupting. JPL’s blog post has more details on what that might mean.

The View from Space

In this JWST shot of the binary star system WR140, that’s not a lens flare you’re seeing. It’s actually 17 distinct, never-before-seen rings of dust that formed as the star duo’s orbits periodically intersected one another. In the words of JPL: “Like rings of a tree, the dust loops mark the passage of time.” Who knew propulsion labs could wax poetic?