Stephen Hawking’s black hole theorem states that the area of a black hole’s event horizon should never shrink, thus reinforcing a series of fundamental insights about its mechanics. MIT physicists have confirmed this theorem for the first time using observations of gravitational waves. To observe this, the team took a closer look at GW150914, the first gravitational wave signal detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), in 2015. Read more for two videos and additional information.
The physcisits then reanalyzed the signal from the gravitational waves before and after the cosmic collision, eventually determining that the event horizon’s area did not decrease after the merger. The theorem predicted by Stephen Hawking is very similar to the second law of thermodynamics, which says that the degree of disorder within an object should also never decrease. This similarity suggests that black holes could behave as thermal, heat-emitting objects.
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It is possible that there’s a zoo of different compact objects, and while some of them are the black holes that follow Einstein and Hawking’s laws, others may be slightly different beasts. So, it’s not like you do this test once and it’s over. You do this once, and it’s the beginning,” said Maximiliano Isi, lead author and a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics & Space Research.
