Recently, scientists observed the merger of giant ‘blackholes’ billions of light-years away from the Earth. What is the significance of this observation?(2019)
a) ‘Higgs boson particles’ were detected.
b) ‘Gravitational waves’ were detected.
c) Possibility of inter-galactic space travel through ‘wormhole’ was confirmed.
d) It enabled the scientists to understand ‘singularity’.
Answer: B
Billions of light years away, two black holes have collided to create a larger one – the biggest black hole merger yet detected. It has a mass more than 80 times that of the sun.
The resulting energy injected into the fabric of spacetime was also record breaking, with five sun’s worth of mass released in the form gravitational waves as the two holes spiralled in towards each other.
Such titanic amounts of energy meant that the signal was still detectable by the time it reached gravitational wave detectors on Earth. It produced a record-breaking result – the most distant collision detected so far, nine billion light years away.
