Scientists from Moscow State University, as part of the international Scientific Collaboration LIGO, took part in the third ever registration of gravitational waves. This was reported in a press release received by "Lenta.ru".
As in the first two cases, the waves were generated by colliding black holes, which merged into a new black hole with a mass of about 49 solar masses. The released energy exceeds the light energy emitted during the same time by all stars and galaxies in the Universe. The source itself is located at a distance of about three billion light years from Earth.
Scientists have found that, with a high probability, black holes have different directions of their own rotation (spin), that is, they rotate in different directions. This means that the objects, apparently, formed in a dense star cluster separately from each other, and only then formed a binary system.
The researchers report that gravitational waves with different frequencies in the studied range propagate from their source to the Earth at the same speed - the speed of light.
Physicists hope that in the future it will be possible to register gravitational waves not only from mergers of black holes, but also from neutron stars, as well as from other sources that the LIGO detectors are aimed at.