Artificial intelligence lights up black hole fusion

A simulation using an artificial intelligence algorithm succeeds in predicting the characteristics of the fusion of two black holes. Nearly five years after the discovery of the first gravitational wave in September 2015, a team from the Center for Theoretical Astrophysics of the California Institute of Technology (CalTech, United States) has just published an article which reveals its details, collisions of black holes. Published in Physical Review Letters of January 11, this work presents the most precise simulation to date to describe the fusion of these compact stars. Machine learning Thus these researchers laid bare the most cataclysmic event that can occur in the Cosmos: the fusion of two black holes, two extremely compact stars, at the origin of the emission of a gravitational wave. Theoretically predicted by Einstein in 1916, it took physicists a century to invent complex and extremely sensitive detectors such as interferometers capable of detecting the tiny vibrations of space-time that are gravitational waves.