Two black hole systems are the investigational topic of DEMOBLACK: one of the projects that have been granted the European Consolidator Grant, which was submitted by Michela Mapelli, a researcher of the National Institute for Astrophysics-INAF and Professor at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

DEMOBLACK is one of the 14 Consolidator Grants 2017 that will be hosted in Italy. Michela Mapelli will conduct her research activity at INAF Astronomical Observatory of Padua.

Funded by the European Research Council-ERC with 2 million euro, the project focuses on one of the most mysterious objects in the Universe. Black hole binaries – the existence of which was anticipated, at the theoretical level, at least 30 years ago – were observed for the first time only in 2015 by LIGO interferometers, which detected gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes.

“My DEMOBLACK project aims at answering the crucial question of the formation channels of these systems”, said Mapelli - “Currently we know at least two formation mechanisms: isolated binary evolution and dynamic evolution. In the former, black holes form from the evolution of two twin stars, i.e. two stars from the same cloud of gas which have always lived together, and have sometimes exchanged their masses. In the latter, the two black holes have no ‘relationship’, but they found themselves in the same system due to the effect of a dynamic interaction”, added the researcher.

To discover which channel is the most important, the project will use innovative numeric simulations, by combining the most advanced codes for computer processing.

Source: ResearchItaly