This ForbesUnder30 alumnus and his team used gravitational waves to discover a new class of black hole:
Mark Myers, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery
What does the discovery of a new black hole look like from Earth? According to astrophysicist and Forbes 30 Under 30 alumnus Karan Jani, it looks like a few wiggles that last for about 0.1 seconds. Jani is on a team that published a new paper Wednesday revealing that these unassuming “wiggles” are gravitational waves caused by an elusive, intermediate-mass type of black hole. It’s the first time a new type of black hole of this size has been detected solely using gravitational waves.
"Most astrophysicists did not believe this type of black hole existed,” Jani says."This is the first confirmed evidence that black holes can exist in this medium-mass range." The idea of using gravitational waves to detect black holes is both very young and very old. In 1916, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves: invisible ripples in space-time that propagate through the universe after an energetic event. But it took almost 100 years for scientists to confirm the existence of these waves, which were found by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory group in 2015 .
There are several classes of black holes, the most common of which are supermassive black holes, which are millions of times as massive as our sun, and stellar black holes, which are 10 to 24 times the mass of our sun. As the name implies, intermediate-mass black holes are the Goldilocks of the universe; this new black hole weighs in at about 142 times the mass of the sun. The researchers think that this black hole was created by two smaller black holes that collided and merged eons ago.
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