연락처 : VQ 이메일 : alyciadavitt@yahoo.com Spinning very fast
The other surprising feature of GW231123 is how quickly the two black holes are spinning around each other.

"So far, most black holes we have found with gravitational waves have been spinning fairly slowly," said Charlie Hoy. "This suggests that GW231123 may have formed through a different mechanism compared to other observed mergers, or it could be a sign that our models need to change."

Such high-speed spins are hard to produce, but they also support the idea that the black holes had undergone prior mergers, because scientists would expect previously merged black holes to spin faster, according to Hannam.

"GW231123 challenges our models of gravitational wave signals, as it is complex to model such (fast) spins, and it stands out as an extraordinary event that is puzzling to interpret," said Sophie Bini, a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech and a member of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration. "What surprised me the most is how much there is still to learn about gravitational waves. I really hope that in the future we can observe other events similar to GW231123 to improve our understanding of such systems."

The previous record for the most massive black hole merger ever observed belonged to a merger called GW190521, which was only 60% as big as GW231123. But scientists could find even more massive mergers in the future, Hannam said, and the collisions might one day be observed through even more accurate instruments that could become available the next couple of decades, such as the proposed Cosmic Explorer in the US and the Einstein Telescope in Europe.

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This new discovery opens a new window on how black holes can form and grow, said Imre Bartos, an associate professor at the University of Florida who was not involved with the research. "It also shows how quickly gravitational wave astronomy is maturing," he added. "In less than a decade we’ve moved from first detection to charting territory that challenges our best theories."

While he agrees that previous mergers could explain both the high mass and the fast spin of the black holes, other possibilities include repeated collisions in young star clusters or the direct collapse of an unusually massive star. He added, however, that those possibilities would be less likely to produce black holes that spin this fast.

It is very natural to explain the black holes in GW231123 as remnants of one or even multiple generations of previous mergers, said Zoltan Haiman, a professor at the Institute of Science and pinup India cricket Technology Austria who also was not involved with the discovery. "This idea was already raised immediately after the first ever LIGO detection of a (black hole) merger, but this new merger is very hard to explain in other ways."

Future detections, he added, will tell us "whether this heavyweight bout was a one‑off or the tip of a very hefty iceberg."