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On 10th anniversary, LIGO verifies Hawking’s theorem
The LIGO-VIRGO-KAGRA team has announced a black hole merger similar to its first detection; a decade’s worth of technological advances allow unprecedented tests of General Relativity to be performed.
Cornell astrophysicists Saul Teukolsky and Larry Kidder earned a share in the 2016 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics – a $3 million award – for their contributions to the project. “The incredible accomplishments of the experimentalists have reduced the instrument noise to such an extent that we can now confirm Hawking’s theorem almost perfectly,” said Teukolsky, who is the Hans A. Bethe Professor of Physics and Astrophysics, Emeritus, in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences. In the new study, the researchers were able to precisely measure the details of the ringdown phase, which allowed them to calculate the mass and spin of the black hole, and subsequently determine its surface area.
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