Gravitational waves are fluctuations in the structure of space-time, spreading at the speed of light that occur as a result of the most powerful events in the Universe, such as the fusion of black holes, supernovae or even during a large explosion. From the moment of their first detection in 2015, about 100 such waves have been recorded by the LIGO and Virgo observatories.
Thanks to these observations, scientists begin to reveal the secrets of black holes, study gravity in extreme conditions, and even determine the process of formation of elements such as gold or platinum, during the merger of neutron stars.
Theoretical models are used to determine the sources of gravitational waves, which resembles the operation of the Shazam application that determines the details of musical compositions. The accuracy of such models is ensured by complex numerical simulations on powerful supercomputers.
However, recently a team of scientists under the leadership of Dr. Juan Calderon Bustillo from the Galician Institute of High Energy Physics (Spain) and Dr. Isaac Vong from the Chinese University of Hong Kong assumed to change the approach to the analysis of gravitational waves.
Instead of integrating the results of simulations, scientists offer to use derivatives of detectors data, leaving simulations without changes. This simplifies the process of obtaining templates for comparison with LIGO and Virgo data and allows you to safely analyze any sources that supercomputers can simulate.
The so-called boson stars cause special interest to the teams – objects similar to black holes, but fundamentally different from them by the lack of horizon of events and singularity.
Professor Alejandro Torres from the University of Valencia notes that the new approach greatly simplifies data analysis.
In a separate work published in the journal Physical Review D, the team compared some events of gravitational waves observed by LIGO and VIRGO, with an extensive catalog of the mergers of boson stars.
Professor Carlos Erdeiro from the University of Avreiro suggested that the fusion of boson stars can be part of what we know as dark matter.
One of the most mysterious observed events, GW190521, turned out to be consistent with such simulations. This confirms the results obtained by the team in 2020.
Samson Leong, graduate student of the Chinese University of