Black Hole Archaeology

University Of Hawaii, Honolulu

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports research in relativity and relativistic astrophysics, and it addresses the priority areas of NSF's "Windows on the Universe" Big Idea. The science of gravitational wave astronomy has opened a new window on the universe. Through it, we can observe the light-speed collisions of black holes, some of the most enigmatic objects in the universe. These objects are the remnants of very massive stars (30-100 times heavier than the Sun) that collapsed under their own gravity millions of light-years across the Universe. Similar to how archeology uses the remnants of ancient civilizations to understand how they lived their lives, this project, Black Hole Archaeology, will use these black hole remnants to understand the processes governing the lives of massive stars. Black Hole Archaeology will advance our understanding of the structure and evolution of stars, test Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, and shed new light on the nature of dark matter. The sensational themes of the project — exploding stars, general relativity, and ripples in spacetime — will become the foundation of a new and exciting outreach project that will see volunteer researchers engage students at the K-12 level in schools across the island of O’ahu in an effort to remove barriers responsible for the under-representation of Native Hawaiians in STEM disciplines, and to mitigate inequities in the exposure of K-12 students to STEM engagement across the island. This project will develop novel competitive probes of stellar structure theory, dark matter, dark energy, and gravity using black hole population statistics. The mass function of astrophysical black holes offers unique insights into the processes governing their progenitors: massive stars. The shape of the mass function as well as the location of features such as the black hole mass gap are sensitive to stellar process such as nuclear reactions, as well as potential new physics such as novel energy losses due to dark matter and dark energy, and modifications of general relativity. The goals of this project are: 1. develop numerical codes capable of theoretically predicting the astrophysical black hole mass spectrum (including the location of the mass gap) in competing dark matter, dark energy, and gravity theories, and when the rates of nuclear reactions effecting massive stars are varied; 2. develop a novel theoretical astrophysical black hole mass function whose free parameters correspond directly with important astrophysical quantities such as the location of the mass gap; and 3. train the next generation of scientists by coaching graduate and undergraduate students in this highly interdisciplinary frontier science. This project will expand the science applications of gravitational wave astronomy by enabling information about fundamental physics and the processes governing massive stars to be extracted from gravitational wave catalogs. This will enable a deeper understanding of stellar structure, nuclear physics, particle physics, cosmology, and gravitation. The project will probe physics in regimes that are inaccessible to stellar surveys, particle physics, cosmological missions, and direct detection experiments, and will thus establish a new complementary frontier. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.