5 Things We Still Don't Know About Black Holes (And 2 We Do) After LIGO
“1.) How small are the lowest-mass black holes?
LIGO has yet to detect any low-amplitude binaries, providing no information about this population.”
Beginning in 2015, the LIGO detectors began to see robust, bona fide signals of gravitational waves. Of the 11 signals detected to date, 10 of them correspond to black hole-black hole mergers. Gravitational wave astronomy has not only opened up a whole new eye on the Universe, it’s opened up a whole new world as far as our understanding of black holes go. With these 10 mergers under our belt, and an upgraded data run expected later this year, it’s time to take stock of what we don’t yet know, and how we hope to get there.
Here’s where we are today in our understanding of LIGO’s black holes.
