Finding Black Holes With Gravitational Gamma Lenses

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Short gamma-ray bursts are probably the screams of colliding neutrons stars blowing up as kilonovas. When such a scream passes through gravitational lenses it allows us to catch something interesting.


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Image by Joachim Mayr from Pixabay

You probably know that black holes do come in three sizes. First, we have “small” black holes created when a massive star explodes as a supernova. This leaves behind a black hole with a mass of up to a few dozen Suns. On the other extreme, we have supermassive black holes. While we aren’t exactly sure how they are created but we do know that their mass attacks the limits of our imagination as their mass attacks millions or even billions of Suns.

So, you might be seeing a bit of a gap between the types of black holes we described so far. This gap should be filled with Intermediate Mass Black Holes (IMBH). But as you might guess, there’s a problem We can’t fin them. While we do know about a few candidates for them that doesn’t mean much as these are mostly just “proven” by indirect evidence or there are other objects that could be there instead of IMBHs. And from what we know, IMBHs should be relatively common.

Recently, James Paynter from the University of Melbourne and his colleagues caught something interesting that seems to change everything. By analyzing a gamma-ray burst they discovered a gravitation lens. And the lens seems to be a mid-sized black hole with a mass of 55,000 Suns. If they are correct it would be the first black hole of this size we tracked down.

The gamma-ray burst that was analyzed only lasted for about half a second. I should also include a bit about gamma-ray bursts as each is essentially an original and we again aren’t exactly sure where they come from. But lately, more evidence that suggests gamma-ray bursts come from kilonovas – the collisions of neutron stars. And sometimes gamma-ray bursts have a bit of an echo that seems to be created by gravitation lenses. And this exact kind of echo was found by Paynter and his colleagues when they analyzed the gamma-ray burst GRB 950830.

While the researchers do believe the lensing was caused by an IMBH there is always the possibility it was caused by something different such as a compact star cluster of similar mass.

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