Extreme Gravitational Waves May Create Black Holes
Gravitational wave research is still at its very beginnings. It has been just a few years since we first observed them. That is why theoretical research into them is still quite popular and sometimes even quite extravagant.
By NASA/CXC/M.Weiss (http://www.sun.org/images/black-hole-cygnus-x-1) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
And that is the case for the new study that was recently published by Frans Pretorius from Princeton and William East from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. They studied gravitational waves and watched what happen when two high-energy gravitational waves collide. So far we have only observed spherical gravitational waves, similar to how waves look when you throw a rock into a lake as those get created when neutron stars or black holes collide.
Pretorius’s and East’s work with straight gravitational waves and in their theoretical equations they let them collide with each other. Such waves then look more like a tsunami. They should be created by objects with mass moving close to light-speed. When they are low-energy waves not much should happen. But if waves with high energy collide that should be much more interesting. The spacetime continuum should be severely stretched by these and during the collision, space might fold on itself. Creating a black hole. Simulations show that 85 percent of the original energy gets sucked into a black hole and the remaining 15 % will get radiated away as spherical gravitational waves.
So how exactly does that work? Could such gravitational waves make a black hole out of the Earth? Well, theoretically yes. If Pretorius and East are correct then theoretically yes. The creation of a black hole would require such high-energy gravitational waves that we haven’t observed them yet.
The gravitational waves we have observed so far compress or stretch spacetime only by a few atoms at the very most and those are created by collisions of gigantic black holes. To have a black hole created space would have to compress or stretch by kilometers so you can sleep well, it’s not likely going to happen.
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