{"id":120171,"date":"2021-03-03T16:25:05","date_gmt":"2021-03-04T00:25:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/03\/eerie-stars-of-dark-matter-may-be-behind-largest-gravitational-wave-detection-yet"},"modified":"2021-03-03T16:25:05","modified_gmt":"2021-03-04T00:25:05","slug":"eerie-stars-of-dark-matter-may-be-behind-largest-gravitational-wave-detection-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/03\/eerie-stars-of-dark-matter-may-be-behind-largest-gravitational-wave-detection-yet","title":{"rendered":"Eerie Stars of \u2018Dark Matter\u2019 May Be Behind Largest Gravitational Wave Detection Yet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/eerie-stars-of-dark-matter-may-be-behind-largest-gravitational-wave-detection-yet2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>On 21 May 2019, from a distance of 7 billion light-years away, our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/gravitational-waves\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"gravitational wave\">gravitational wave<\/a> detectors were rocked by the most massive collision yet. From analysis of the signal, astronomers concluded that the detection was the result of two <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/black-holes\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"black holes\">black holes<\/a> smashing together, weighing in at 66 and 85 times the mass of the Sun respectively.<\/p>\n<p>But what if it was something else? A new study offers a different interpretation of the event. It\u2019s possible, according to an international team of astrophysicists, that the two objects were not black holes at all, but mysterious, theoretical objects called boson stars \u2014 potentially made up of elusive candidates for <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/dark-matter\" target=\"_blank\" title=\"dark matter\">dark matter<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The gravitational wave event, called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/most-massive-black-hole-collision-yet-is-finally-proof-of-middleweight-black-holes\">GW 190521<\/a>, was a spectacular discovery. The object that resulted from the merger of the two objects would have been a black hole at around 142 times the mass of the Sun \u2014 within the intermediate mass range that no black hole had ever been detected before, called the black hole upper mass gap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On 21 May 2019, from a distance of 7 billion light-years away, our gravitational wave detectors were rocked by the most massive collision yet. From analysis of the signal, astronomers concluded that the detection was the result of two black holes smashing together, weighing in at 66 and 85 times the mass of the Sun [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}