#BSMJournalClub: Recent discovery by VIGO and LIGO. A Binary Black Hole Merger with a Total Mass of 150 solar masses

por Nicolás Sanchis-Gual (CENTRA, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon), Pablo Cerdá-Durán (UV)

miércoles 30 sept. 2020 15:00 → 16:00 Europe/Madrid

Online (Online)

Two members of the Virgo Valencia group kindly agreed to tell us all we wanted to know (but never dared to ask) about the recent discovery by the Virgo and LIGO collaborations of a record-breaking black hole collision leading to the formation of a black hole of about 142 solar masses. First, Pablo Cerdá-Durán (Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Astronomy and Astrophysics Department, U. Valencia) will discuss the basics of the famous GW190521 event (the publication can be found here) and explain why the discovered black holes have come as a surprise, namely, why the values of their masses are not allowed by current stellar evolution models. And then, Nicolás Sanchis-Gual (postdoctoral researcher at CENTRA, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon) will discuss his recent work 2009.05376, in which Nico and his collaborators show that GW190521 is consistent with numerically simulated signals from collisions of two vector boson stars composed of an ultralight vector boson with a mass of the order of 10^(-12) eV.