On January 7, 2022, it was sorted out and released that the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) has determined multiple gravitational wave detection of merging black holes in the past few years, in memory of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Kip Thorne, Barry Barish and Rainer Weiss. The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Andrea Ghez, Reinhard Genzel and Roger Penrose to celebrate the clear confirmation of the existence of black holes. Therefore, understanding the origin of black holes has become a core issue in physics.
Surprisingly, LIGO recently observed a candidate black hole with 2.6 solar mass (event GW190814, reported in Astrophysical Journal Letters 896 (2020) 2, L44). Suppose this is a black hole, not an abnormally large neutron star. Where does it come from?
Solar mass black holes are particularly interesting because they are not expected by traditional astrophysics of stellar evolution. Such black holes may appear in the early universe (primitive black holes), or "transform" from existing neutron stars. Some black holes may have formed in the early universe long before stars and galaxies formed. This primitive black hole can constitute some or all of the dark matter. If a neutron star captures an original black hole, the black hole will consume the neutron star from the inside and turn it into a solar mass black hole. No matter how small the original black hole is, this process can produce a large number of black holes with solar mass. Other forms of dark matter can accumulate inside the neutron star, causing it to eventually collapse into a solar mass black hole.
A new study published in the Physical Review Letters has advanced a decisive test to investigate the origin of solar mass black holes. This work was led by Volodymyr Takhistov, a researcher at the Kavli Institute of Astrophysics and Mathematics (Kavli IPMU). The international team includes George M. Fuller, an outstanding professor of physics and director of the Center for Astrophysics and Space Science at the University of California, San Diego, and a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles Kavli IPMU visited Alexander Kusenko, a senior scientist.
