(ORDO NEWS) — Astrophysicists have found reasons why massive black holes can be detected with gravitational wave detectors, but they are completely invisible to telescopes.
Despite the accuracy of modern telescopes, they still have not been able to find a single sufficiently massive black hole. Now scientists have figured out why
Our telescopes have never detected a black hole with a mass 20 times that of the Sun. Nevertheless, we know that such objects exist, because their signals are recorded by the LIGO and Virgo detectors.
Before the discovery of gravitational waves, astrophysicists using conventional telescopes found evidence for the existence of stellar-mass black holes.
However, no sufficiently massive object has ever been found – such as those found today by gravitational wave detectors.
To date, about 50 pairs of merging black holes with a mass of more than 20 solar masses have been discovered.
But telescopes have so far failed to catch a single such object. This discrepancy can be partly explained by the large volumes of space being explored by gravitational wave detectors.
They can find more massive black holes more easily because their waves are stronger compared to waves from lighter objects.
But we use telescopes much longer than gravitational wave detectors, how is it that they do not see massive objects?
In a new paper, astrophysicists report that telescope observations fail to detect massive black holes. Such massive black holes can, in principle, be observed only if they consume a companion star.
However, in practice, the circumstances for observing such objects were too difficult, which explains the lack of massive black holes found with telescopes.
The largest black holes are formed by the collapse of massive stars, not by supernova explosions.
Formed as a result of compression, these massive black holes remain in the same place where their predecessor was born – in the plane of the Milky Way galaxy.
However, this means that they remain shrouded in dust and gas.
Their lighter sisters and brothers, born from massive stars in supernova explosions, can move out of the plane of the Milky Way as a result of a release of energy, making them more visible to telescopes.
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