UNITED STATES: According to a study from Quanta Magazine, an international team of researchers has now established that slowly rotating Kerr black holes are stable.
Roy Kerr, a mathematician, solved Einstein’s equations in 1963 and described the spacetime surrounding what is now known as a rotating black hole.
Scientists have been attempting to demonstrate the stability of these black holes for decades. They have finally come up with a method that establishes the Kerr black hole type’s stability while it rotates slowly. They did this by building on years of work with Kerr’s models.
Stability of Black Holes
Even after receiving a strong shock from gravitational waves, a black hole will eventually return to Kerr’s mathematical description if it is stable. Einstein’s theory of gravitation would need to be fundamentally altered if these black holes were unstable. The scientific world would need to reevaluate what it now understands about the cosmic giants.
The researchers who developed the new formula wondered if a black hole may be permanently altered or even destroyed if gravitational waves struck it. In contrast, if enough sound waves precisely match the resonance frequency of a wine glass, it will begin to vibrate and may even break.
They investigated a number of possibilities, such as a gravitational wave piercing a Kerr black hole’s event horizon and entering its innards. This might change the mass and rotation of the black hole.
They proposed that gravitational waves might also assemble and spin with enough force close to the black hole to produce a brand-new singularity, which would be a sure sign of instability.
A victory
The scientists are Sergiu Klainerman from Princeton University, Elena Giorgi from Columbia University, and Jérémie Szeftel from Sorbonne University. They are all mathematicians. They expanded on the findings of prior experts in the field to finally show that Kerr black holes are stable. Four genuine efforts have been made, and we just so happen to be the fortunate ones, Klainerman continued. As they say, a “win for the entire field.”
For slowly rotating black holes, the three mathematicians established stability; this has not yet been done for quickly rotating black holes. Although prior relevant work by the same scientists has been accepted for publication, their work has not yet undergone peer review.
Demetrios Christodoulou, a mathematician at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, said in an interview with Quanta Magazine that the new finding represents “a milestone in the mathematical evolution of general relativity.” Thanks to these new mathematical models and cutting-edge imaging technology from the Event Horizon Telescope, we now have a better grasp of the enormous black holes at the centres of many of the universe’s galaxies.
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