Weird 'gravitational molecules' could orbit black holes like electrons swirling around atoms
By Paul Sutter - Astrophysicist 10 hours ago
This computer simulation shows supermassive black holes only 40 orbits from merging.
(Image: © NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)
Black holes are notable for many things, especially their simplicity. They're just
holes. That are "black." This simplicity allows us to draw surprising parallels between black holes and other branches of physics. For example, a team of researchers has shown that a special kind of particle can exist around a pair of black holes in a similar way as an electron can exist around a pair of hydrogen atoms the first example of a "gravitational molecule." This strange object may give us hints to the identity of dark matter and the ultimate nature of space-time.
Ploughing the field
To understand how the new research, which was published in September to the preprint database arXiv, explains the existence of a gravitational molecule, we first need to explore one of the most fundamental - and yet sadly almost never talked about - aspects of modern physics: the field.
A field is a mathematical tool that tells you what you might expect to find as you travel from place to place in the universe. For example, if you've ever seen a TV weather report of temperatures in your local area, you're looking at a viewer-friendly representation of a field: As you travel around your town or state, you'll know what kind of temperatures you're likely to find, and where (and whether you need to bring a jacket).
This kind of field is known as a "scalar" field, because "scalar" is the fancy mathematical way of saying "just a single number." There are other kinds of fields out there in physics-land, like "vector" fields and "tensor" fields, which provide more than one number for every location in space-time. (For example, if you see a map of wind speed and direction splashed on your screen, you're looking at a vector field.) But for the purposes of this research paper, we only need to know about the scalar kind.
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