Professor Kip Thorne believes that we are approaching a golden
age for the study of black holes.
Thorne was a student of the late John
Wheeler, the Princeton physicist who gave a name to these space
phenomena. He is also a close friend of
Professor Stephen Hawking and one of three luminaries to give a
talk at an event marking the physicist's 70th birthday.
Speaking to Wired.co.uk before the event, he
explained that two key pieces of technology could propel
cosmologists into a new age of discovery. The first are simulations
on supercomputers, using which Thorne says physicists can solve
Einstein's equations to see how warped space time behave in
particular when black holes collide. He explains: "Using these, we
are learning about the dynamics of highly warped space time.
"And for the first time, we are able to study black holes that
aren't simply quiescent, sitting there spinning, but are highly
distorted and bashing into each other. We can see structures coming
out of the black holes including as many as six vortexes of
The second key development is the instalment of detectors around
the world designed to observe gravitational waves. These include
the Laser Interferometer
Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) at Caltech and the
European Laser Interface Space Antenna (LISA), which is
expected to be operational by 2022. These will be able to see the
events that the cosmologists are currently simulating on computers.
Says Thorne: "We will be able to watch black holes collide and
watch these vortexes do their thing creating spiral arms around the
black hole. These detectors will simultaneously be observational
and theoretical tools."
And they will help in the differentiation between the two main
types of black holes -- astrophysical and quantum -- which Thorne
described in his talk as "as different as
an elephant is to an amoeba".
But it is the collision of black holes that could most capture
the public's imagination when the wave-forms from these events are
recorded. These are "the most violent events in the universe," says
Thorne, adding that the "power output during collision is 10,000
times the luminosity of all of the stars in the universe put
together". Brain-blowing stuff.