April 11, 2008 -- Researchers have successfully simulated the outcome of what is perhaps the heaviest of heavyweight match-ups in the universe: the collision of three colossal black holes.
The triple collision and merger simulation comes on the heels of the actual discovery of a triple quasar last year. Quasars are gigantic black holes, billions of times more massive than the sun, located at the center of a galaxy.
They are visible only when matter is falling violently into them. A triple quasar, therefore, implies that three galaxies have collided.
This sort of super-heavyweight battle is of particular interest to physicists hunting for the so far elusive gravitational waves that were predicted by the theories of Albert Einstein.
To model the three-way clash and merging of such massive objects, researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology's (RIT) Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation used a supercomputer that crunched a lot of tough equations for a week.
"You have to solve Einstein's equations," said black hole modeler Carlos Lousto of RIT. "You end up solving a huge system of equations. It's a really massive problem."
Lousto and his colleagues Manuela Campanelli and Yosef Zlochower are scheduled to present their results on April 15 at the meeting of the American Physical Society in St. Louis.
The discovery of the triple quasar made it clear that it's more than academic as well, Lousto told Discovery News.
"The most likely event is to have two black holes merge," Lousto said.
Next in line is the triple merger, then quadruple merger. Among the things discovered in the modeling of three is that the gravitational waves given off by the event are quite different than those waves created by two black holes. Four black holes merging will very likely have yet another gravitational wave signature, he said.
Knowing these signatures in advance is expected to be very useful for identifying the sources of real gravitational waves -- when they are successfully detected.
"This illustrates a great progress theorists are making in numerical modeling of black hole mergers," said astronomer George Djorgovski of the California Institute of Technology. He was one of the discoverers of the triple quasar last year. "Such processes must have played an important role in the co-evolution of galaxies and their central, super-massive black holes, especially in the first few billion years of the cosmic history."
The trio of real quasars is about 10.5 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. In other words, the light from the quasars was emitted from matter falling into the black holes when the universe was a tad more than 3 billion years old.
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