{"id":196379,"date":"2024-09-19T01:29:16","date_gmt":"2024-09-19T06:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/09\/signatures-of-gravitational-atoms-from-black-hole-mergers"},"modified":"2024-09-19T01:29:16","modified_gmt":"2024-09-19T06:29:16","slug":"signatures-of-gravitational-atoms-from-black-hole-mergers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/09\/signatures-of-gravitational-atoms-from-black-hole-mergers","title":{"rendered":"Signatures of Gravitational Atoms from Black Hole Mergers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/signatures-of-gravitational-atoms-from-black-hole-mergers2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Gravitational-wave signals from black hole mergers could reveal the presence of \u201cgravitational atoms\u201d\u2014black holes surrounded by clouds of axions or other light bosons.<\/p>\n<p>Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar famously stated that black holes are \u201cthe most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the Universe: The only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time.\u201d His observation relates to the fact that astrophysical black holes, as described by the Kerr spacetime, can be characterized by just two parameters: mass and spin. However, things might get more complex. Theorists have predicted that if a bosonic field interacts with a Kerr black hole, perturbations in the field can grow to form a cloud around the black hole, creating a \u201cgravitational atom,\u201d in which the bosons surrounding the black hole behave somewhat like the electrons surrounding an atomic nucleus [1] (Fig. 1). What\u2019s more, if such a gravitational atom is part of a binary involving a second black hole, excitations and ionization processes akin to those occurring in hydrogen atoms may affect how the black hole binary evolves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gravitational-wave signals from black hole mergers could reveal the presence of \u201cgravitational atoms\u201d\u2014black holes surrounded by clouds of axions or other light bosons. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar famously stated that black holes are \u201cthe most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the Universe: The only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time.\u201d His [\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-196379","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\/196379","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=196379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196379\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}