Member-only story
SPACE
Colliding Black Holes And Expansion Of The Universe
Or… Detecting ripples from distant black hole mergers can mean that we can look back in time
Understanding How The Universe Has Evolved
Scientists may have found a way of using the collisions of black holes to measure the rate at which the universe is expanding and solve some of the mysteries surrounding dark energy, the mysterious force that drives accelerated cosmic expansion.
The violent mergers of black holes launch ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves, and the new technique measures changes in these signals that occur as they experience the universe’s expansion firsthand.
So scientists hope to use cosmic collisions between tight binary black hole pairings as what the team term ‘spectral sirens’ to provide an alternative measurement technique for the Hubble constant.
At the heart of the spectral siren method are gravitational waves — ripples in the very fabric of space and time — that are launched by powerful cosmic events like the collision and merger of massive compact objects like neutron stars and black holes.
“For example, if you took a black hole and put it earlier in the universe, the…
