From Infinite Past To Infinite Future: Journey Of A Gravitational Wave Through Black Hole Spacetime

Black hole. Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

by Tejasri Gururaj, Phys.org

edited by Gaby Clark, reviewed by Robert Egan

In a new Physical Review Letters study, researchers have successfully followed a gravitational wave's complete journey from the infinite past to the infinite future as it encounters a black hole.

Reported by scientists from the University of Otago and the University of Canterbury, the study represents the first time anyone has captured the full cause-and-effect relationship of gravitational wave scattering in a single simulation.

The researchers are tackling the scattering problem in gravitational physics. In other words, they want to understand what happens to gravitational waves when they encounter massive objects (like black holes) and scatter off them.

They need to track waves from past null infinity (where incoming gravitational waves originate in spacetime) to future null infinity (where outgoing radiation ultimately travels).