How Memory Turns Black Holes into Multivoiced Bells ✛ ✦

Original: "Black Hole Memory Burden and its Signatures in Gravitational Waves from Mergers"

· Gia Dvali, Michael Zantedeschi, Sebastian Zell

arXiv:2607.03560 · 2026-07-03 · CC BY 4.0 · 1 min

General Relativity Cosmology HEP Phenomenology HEP Theory

Information stored inside a black hole changes its vibrations — scientists can thus read its history.

Every black hole is a giant bell that stores the history of its birth. After a supernova explosion at the end of a star's life, it absorbs everything that happened. This information is multiplied by an unimaginable number of internal 'imprints'—physicists Bekenstein, Hawking, and Wheeler were the first to describe such colossal memory of black holes.

A 30-solar-mass black hole contains more distinct states than there are atoms in the visible universe.

When two such bells merge, they give birth to ripples in spacetime — gravitational waves, captured by detectors like LIGO. Memory shifts their frequency: a hole made of dark matter 'rings' at a lower pitch than one made of ordinary stellar stuff. It's like analyzing light by its colors, but here we break down the ripples themselves into frequencies. And here's the surprise: information about particles, entangled by an invisible bond, actually changes the voice of the cosmic giant. We hear quanta conducting galaxies.

Whole graph →

A 30-solar-mass black hole hides roughly 10⁸⁰ different 'internal patterns'—that's a number with 80 zeros, far more than atoms in the visible universe.

|\frac{\Delta f}{f}| \simeq \mu^{-1} |\delta g|^{2(p-1)}

The relative change in gravitational wave frequency is proportional to μ⁻¹ and the perturbation amplitude to the power of 2(p-1).

\mu = \frac{\epsilon_0 N_c}{\sqrt{E_P}}

μ is the ratio of energy invested in creating the enhanced memory state to the minimum energy of such a pattern.

Scientists

Jacob Bekenstein Stephen Hawking John Archibald Wheeler Fritz Zwicky Karl Schwarzschild Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Concepts

black hole memory effect black hole memory burden gravitational wave echoes information loss critical collapse ringdown bubble collision wave amplification dark matter gravitational waves nuclear reaction mass gap mass ratio effective spin accretion disk wind dark matter subhalo barrow entropy overtones direct waves event horizon event gw190814

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How Memory Turns Black Holes into Multivoiced Bells ✛ ✦