A black hole spinning at a fifth of the speed of light has helped prove a prediction made by Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity
This wobbling, known as precession, occurs when the orbit or rotation of an object slowly changes with time – a common example is when a spinning top begins to spin at a different angle as it slows down. Gravity-induced orbital precession, a consequence of general relativity’s prediction that heavy objects bend space-time, sees the shape of such an object’s orbit change over time.
This effect had been observed very weakly in neutron stars orbiting one another, but was so subtle that the orbits only wobbled, or precessed, at a rate of a few times a year.at Cardiff University, UK, and his colleagues have seen a much more extreme effect in a pair of black holes moving at a fifth of the speed of light, caused by one of them spinning at a 90-degree angle to its orbital motion. As they merged, the, that carried the signature of precession at a rate of three times a second.
“It’s 10 billion times faster than what was found in earlier measurements, so it really is the most extreme regime of Einstein’s theory where space and time are warped and distorted in completely crazy ways,” says Hannam. To identify the precession, the team reanalysed data first collected in 2020 by three gravitational wave detectors, based in the US and Italy. A previous analysis was inconclusive, but using a more advanced model of the gravitational wave signal, Hannam and his team found that the best way to explain the signal was with one of the black holes, spinning at almost the upper limit allowed by general relativity, causing the orbit of the system to precess.
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