The article, written by Michelle Starr was published on February 8th, 2020. This article explained all about how scientists found gravitational wave echoes that could confirm the theory of Hawking radiation – put forward in 1974 by English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author Stephen Hawking. This was a very interesting article that had us both more informed and more confused. We really enjoyed dissecting this article and this recent discovery. Some parts we found were interesting and the others were not really surprising. A part that we found interesting was
All black holes are formed and all about the quantum fuzz. Black holes are formed when a huge star collapses. It depends on how much the mass of a star’s core is. If the star’s core is 1.4 times the mass of the sun then it becomes a white dwarf. If the core of the star is between 1.4 and 2.8 times the was of the sun then it turns into a neutron star. It the mass of the core is even more then it turns into a black hole. Even though we found some parts interesting one part really caught our eye. The existence of Hawking radiation. Hawking radiation is named after Stephen Hawking for his theory that electromagnetic radiation slowly escapes a black hole, meaning a black hole can evaporate. This theory was put forward by Stephen Hawking in 1974 and called the black hole information paradox.
This article relates to our science class because we learned about the scientific process and analyzing data at the beginning of the year and this whole article is mainly about how scientists analyzed data from their instruments. In science class, we learned about the Scientific Method: Ask a question, formulate a hypothesis design and conduct an experiment to test your hypothesis, collect and analyze data, make a tentative conclusion, and finally test your conclusion, or refine your question, and go through each step again. The scientists collected data and analyzed it for special signals. Niayesh Afshordi, astronomer and physicist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and Jahed Abedi, a cosmologist at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany, believe they could have detected echoes in their gravitational wave data.
They predicted that “‘If the quantum fuzz responsible for Hawking radiation does exist around black holes, gravitational waves could bounce off of it, which would create smaller gravitational wave signals following the main gravitational collision event, similar to repeating echoes’” (Starr). Then, by analyzing their data, they figured out that their results “match the simulated echoes predicted by models of fuzzy black holes emitting Hawking radiation” (Starr). Their hypothesis was that gravitational wave echoes would bounce off the quantum fuzz produced by Hawking radiation in a pattern similar to repeating echoes. They collected data and analyzed it for specific wave signals. Now to refine their results and test their conclusion, they can look for similar results in other data sets, now that they know what to look for.
