Black holes confirm Hawking’s old event horizon theory – Science News.co.uk

The event horizon, which is the boundary of black holes beyond which nothing can return, not even light, should never shrink. This claim is part of one of Stephen Hawking’s main theories, a formula published in 1971. As a statement on the MIT website notes, this “law” was first confirmed in a study. A study published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
This is a theory that can never be proven, because the only way to do it is to analyze gravitational waves, and these were discovered, for the first time, a few years ago. years only.

Gravitational wave signal GW150914

To reach this conclusion, the team of researchers analyzed the source of a gravitational wave signal, called GW150914, that was intercepted by the Laser Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2015. This source will come from two black holes that have merged, generating a new black hole . This merger caused the emission of very powerful energy propagated in space-time by what are called gravitational waves, which then reached the Earth.
According to Hawking’s theory, the area covered by the event horizon of the resulting new black hole should not be less than the total area of ​​the horizon of the black holes that generated it.

The final event horizon is no smaller

The researchers found that the area of ​​GW150914’s event horizon is no smaller after the merger. The researchers came to this conclusion by re-analyzing this signal (which has been studied previously) with data regarding both the time before the collision and the time after the collision. To do this, they created a new, complex model to analyze the signal before the peak emission of the same gravitational waves to calculate the mass and rotation of black holes before merging.

There could be a “zoo” of similar things

According to Maximiliano Essi, a researcher at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, lead author of the study, this does not mean that no other types of black holes behave differently. On the contrary, as the researcher explains, it is possible that there are many other compact objects that do not follow Hawking’s laws and even Einstein’s laws. It could just be different things that we don’t know yet. These statements show how far we are at the beginning of this kind of research and how little we know about these mysterious things that play with their mass and even change space and time around them.