A Date of Two Black Holes: How to Calculate Their Dance More Precisely express
Two black holes, caught in a dance, spiral closer and closer until they merge into one. This dance is not silent: it shakes spacetime itself, sending gravitational waves rippling across the Universe. To understand what we hear in these waves, we need a precise mathematical model of the dance. One of the most successful models is called the "effective one body": it replaces the two holes with a single imaginary particle moving in the curved space created by their combined mass.
But even a good model has its limits. Usually, it is built by expanding complex equations in a series of small velocities. When the holes accelerate to a significant fraction of the speed of light, this series starts to lie. In the new work, physicists took a different series — one in terms of the "strength of gravity" rather than velocity. This allowed them to describe fast motion more accurately. They completed a key part of the model — the so-called effective metric, that is, the rules for how space is curved around the imaginary particle.
The main result: they showed that two different ways of connecting the model to reality give a consistent answer. It's as if two independent surveyors, measuring the same plot, produced identical maps. Now the model can more accurately predict gravitational waves from fast mergers. Such mergers are rare, but they are precisely the ones that can tell us about the most extreme conditions in the Universe.
Someday, gravitational wave detectors will become so sensitive that they will hear both fast and slow mergers without distortion. Then the map built in this work will help decipher every whisper of the Universe.
Gravitational waves from a black hole merger were first detected in 2015. The signal lasted only 0.2 seconds, but in that time, two black holes 29 and 36 times the mass of the Sun merged into one, and three solar masses were converted into wave energy.
In the movie "Interstellar," the characters approach the black hole Gargantua, and time slows down for them. Precise gravity models, like the one improved in this work, help calculate such effects for real objects.