Dr. Karan Jani, along with a group of other researchers, has marveled the world with the latest discovery of a black hole that is 142 times heavier than the sun’s mass. Dr. Karan is an astrophysicist who is originally from Baroda, Gujarat.
Dr. Karan who serves as a physics professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennesse, USA has played a key role in discovering an entirely new breed of black holes that presents far-reaching and fundamental questions about how we understand the universe.
There are about a thousand scientists around the world working together through the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-Wave Observatory Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and the Virgo Collaboration to understand black holes. Vanderbilt research assistant professor Karan Jani was a key contributor to the publications explaining the discovery of this massive black hole and discussing its implications in the journals Physical Review Letters and Astrophysical Journal Letters both of which were published on September 2.
The newest discovery breaks all previous theories about black holes and their formation.
“This is a milestone in modern astronomy and a personal milestone after six years of intensive research of hunting these elusive black holes. The system we’ve discovered is so bizarre that it breaks a number of previous assumptions about how black holes form. We took more than a year to confirm this alien black hole’s existence and are thrilled to be sharing this discovery with the world,” said Dr. Karan Jani, named Vanderbilt’s postdoctoral scholar of the year.
The astrophysicist said it was humbling to be among the first people to see this signal from the universe.
“I feel quite privileged. There are no limits to what we’ll find when we observe the universe. This discovery gives us a great perspective on where we are in our knowledge of the universe and opens some amazing possibilities,” said Karan.
The gravitational-wave signal, labeled GW190521, was detected on May 21, 2019, by LIGO, two 4-kilometer-long interferometers in the United States, and Virgo, a 3-kilometer-long detector in Italy, according to a press release. The signal which resembles four short wiggles, is extremely brief in duration, lasting less than one-tenth of a second. GW190521 was generated by a source that is roughly 5 gigaparsecs away, when the universe was about half its current age, making it one of the most distant gravitational-wave sources detected so far.
Theory of formation of the gargantuan black hole
Named gargantuan black hole, the space vacuity exceeds the theoretical limit to the mass of a black hole that forms when a star dies. It weighs about 142 times the mass of our Sun and was formed about six billion years ago from the collision of two black holes with masses roughly 85 and 65 times that of the Sun.
The research further states that the collision released eight solar masses of energy that burst into the universe as a gravitational wave. This is the most massive collision of black holes ever detected by gravitational waves. It also marks the first identification of what’s known as an intermediate-mass black hole. The researchers said this the current black hole is a third that formed a few million years later after the collision that makes it grow even larger with time.
Yet the theory is still questionable as the probability of this happening is even lower than if two golf balls—one hit into the air from China and the other from Argentina—collided with each other. So they are considering it just a hypothesis, and are still considering and testing a host of theories on how it came to be.
“We have looked into every known scenario that would have created this black hole but doesn’t have a conclusive explanation for it just yet. What we do know for certain is that whatever makes this intermediate-mass black hole is a much rarer process. We will need to find many more to understand their origins,” Karan said.