100 MILLION black holes discovered in Milky Way to cause problems for future space travel – Express.co.uk

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Future space farers will have a hard time navigating the mysterious entities so that they are not sucked in by their intense gravitational pull and lost forever.

The mass discovery of black holes was calculated by scientists from the University of California at Irvine.

Physicists closely inspected the gravitational waves detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO), the scientific group leading the search for the newly discovered phenomenon, in 2015.

When stars collapse on themselves, if they are big enough they form black holes, and when these black holes merge with one another they produce gravitational waves which were detected by LIGO.

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The team traced the source of the ripples in spacetime which led them to the conclusion that there could be 100 million more black holes in our galaxy alone than previously predicted.

James Bullock, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, and co-author of the study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, said: "We were able to work out how many big black holes should exist, and it ended up being in the millions many more than I anticipated.

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Professor Bullock says that the inspiration behind the search for more black holes was born because of the weirdness of gravitational waves ripples in spacetime.

He said: Fundamentally, the detection of gravitational waves was a huge deal.

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The Milky Way above Ijen Volcano, Malaysia

"But then we looked closer at the astrophysics of the actual result, a merger of two 30-solar-mass black holes.

That was simply astounding and had us asking, 'How common are black holes of this size, and how often do they merge?'".

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100 MILLION black holes discovered in Milky Way to cause problems for future space travel - Express.co.uk