In a talk at TED, Levin illustrated her point by conjuring up an example of two black holes spinning around each other and coalescing.
The gravitational field between the two black holes was so strong that it had never been possible to test Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity in such an extreme situation.
The coalescence of two black holes would create even stronger gravitational waves, but physicists believe that there are fewer black holes than neutron stars, so such events would be rarer.
He had been studying optics as part of his astrophysics research (on what happens when two black holes merge) several years ago when the idea popped into his head that mosquitoes find their targets using complex sensory systems.
Over the course of the next few hundred million years, the two black holes in NGC 6240, which are about 3, 000 light-years apart, will drift towards one another and merge to form an even larger supermassive black hole.
For example, the distance between the centers of two black holes in galaxy clusters distant from each other and the gap between cell walls in a living organism differ on a vast scale, despite their sharing of common structures at the atomic level.
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As the leader of the experimental gravity group at Columbia, he is looking into what happens when two black holes or neutron stars merge in the distant universe, and is collaborating with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, a facility funded by the National Science Foundation and located in Louisiana and Hanford, Wash. that aims to detect cosmic gravitational waves.
The researchers estimate that the two light sources come from black holes between 20 million and one billion times more massive than our Sun.
Black holes are known to exist in two classes: The stellar variety result from exploded massive stars and typically pack the mass of a few stars.
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