CANBERRA, Sept. 11 (Xinhua) — Researchers in Australia have joined a global team to observe a collision of two black holes, violent and energetic events in the cosmos, in detail never before seen.
The research, involving Australian scientists, provides strong evidence confirming the late British physicist Stephen Hawking’s 1971 theory that black holes can only grow in size and never shrink, according to a statement released Thursday by the Australian National University (ANU).
The black hole merger, detected on Jan. 14, 2025, about 1.3 billion light-years away, produced a gravitational wave signal so clear that scientists could precisely measure and compare the surface areas of the two original black holes, each 30 to 40 times the mass of the sun, with that of the newly formed larger black hole, it said.
The results demonstrate that the size of the final black hole area is bigger than the sum of the originals, providing the best evidence yet to support Hawking’s hypothesis, said ANU researcher Neil Lu, one of the study’s lead Australian authors.
“When two black holes merge to become one, it causes the final, larger black hole to vibrate like a struck bell, ringing out into the cosmos,” Lu said.
This represents “the strongest and cleanest black hole ‘note’ we’ve ever heard,” matching predictions from Einstein’s theory, he said.
“We’ve just witnessed the laws of thermodynamics play out on the grandest scales imaginable,” said lead researcher Teagan Clarke from Australia’s Monash University.
This result represents a new step towards understanding the quantum properties of black holes, Clarke said.
The findings, published in the American Physical Society’s Physical Review Letters, mark a decade of progress in the global gravitational-wave-hunting network, known as the LVK Collaboration, since the first-ever gravitational wave detection in 2015. ■