Do Merging Dwarf Galaxies Explain a Peculiar Gravitational-Wave Detection?
May 5, 2021•
Physics 14, s52
The hard-to-explain masses of two coalescing black holes could be accounted for if they were the central black holes in two distant, tiny galaxies that merged.
A. Palmese/Fermilab
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On May 21, 2019, the LIGO and Virgo collaborations recorded an unexpected gravitational-wave detection. The signal, designated GW190521, emanated from the coalescence of two black holes whose masses fall into a range that’s forbidden by conventional stellar evolution theories (see Viewpoint: A Heavyweight Merger). Now, Antonella Palmese, at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and the University of Chicago, and Christopher Conselice, at the University of Manchester, UK, propose that the observation can be explained by the merger of the black holes at the centers of two low-mass dwarf galaxies [1]. Such “forbidden mass” black holes could form in dwarf galaxies fro