Friday, June 02, 2017

Third gravitational wave detection by LIGO collaboration

The news about third gravitational wave detection managed to direct the attention of at least some of us from the doings of Donald J. Trump. Also New York Times told about the gravitational wave detection by LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. Gravitational waves are estimated to be created by a black-hole merger at distance of 3 billion light years. The results are published in the article "Observation of a 50-Solar-Mass Binary Black Hole Coalescence at Redshift 0.2" in Phys Rev Lett.

Two black holes with masses 19× M(Sun) and 31× M(Sun) merged to single blackhole hole of with mass of 49× M(Sun) meaning that roughly one solar mass was transformed to gravitational radiation. During the the climax of the merger, they were emitting more energy in the form of gravitational waves than all the stars in the observable universe.

The colliding blackholes were very massive in all three events. There should be some explanation for this. An explanation considered in the article is that the stars giving rise to blackholes were rather primitive containing light elements and this would have allowed large masses. The transformation to blackholes could have occurred directly without the intervening supernova phase. There is indeed quite recent finding showing a disappearance of very heavy star with 25 solar masses suggesting that direct blackhole formation without super-nova explosion is possible for heavy stars.

It is interesting to take a fresh look to these blackhole like entities in TGD framework. This however requires brief summary about the formation of galaxies and stars in TGD Universe (see this and this).

  1. The simplest possibility allowed by TGD is that galaxies as pearls in necklace are knots (or spagettilike substructures) in long cosmic strings. This does not exclude the original identification as closed strings around long cosmic string. These loops must be however knotted. Galactic super-blackhole could correspond to a self-intersection of the long cosmic string. This view is forced by the experimental finding that for mini spirals, there is volume with radius containing essentially constant density of dark matter. The radius of this volume is 2-3 times larger than the volume containing most stars of the galaxy. This region would contain a galactic knot.

    The important conclusion is that stars would be subknots of these galactic knots as indeed proposed earlier. Part of the magnetic energy would decay to ordinary matter giving rise to visible part of start as the cosmic string thickens. This conforms with the finding that the region in which dark matter density seems to be constant has size few times larger than the region containing the stars (size scale is few kpc).

  2. The light beams from supernovas would most naturally arrive along the flux tubes being bound to helical orbits rotating around them. Primordial cosmic string as stars, galaxies, linear structures of galaxies, even elementary particles, hadrons, nuclei, and biomolecules: all these structures would be magnetic flux tubes possibly knotted and linked. The space-time of GRT as a small deformation of M4 would have emerged from cosmic string dominated phase via the TGD counterpart of inflationary period. The signatures of the primordial cosmic string dominated period would be directly visible in all scales! We would be seeing the incredibly simple truth but our theories would prevent us to become aware about what we are seeing!

The crucial question concerns the dark matter fraction of the star.
  1. The fraction depends on the thickness of the deformed cosmic string having originally 1-D projection E3⊂ M4. If Kähler magnetic energy dominates, the energy per length for a thickened flux tube is proportional to 1/S, S the area of M4 projection and thus decreases rapidly with thickening. The thickness of the flux tube would be in minimum about CP2 size scale of 104 Planck lengths. If S is large enough, the contribution of cosmic string to the mass of the star is smaller than that of visible matter created in the thickening.

  2. What about very primitive stars - say those associated with LIGO mergers. The proportion of visible matter in star should gradually increase as flux tube thickens. Could the detected blackhole fusion correspond to a fusion of dark matter stars rather than that of Einsteinian blackholes? If the radius of the objects satisfies rS=2GM, the blackhole like entities are in question also in TGD. The space-time sheet assigable to blachhole according to TGD has however two horizons. The first horizon would be a counterpart of the usual Schwartschild horizons. At second horizon the signature of the induced metric would become Euclidian - this is possible only in TGD. Cosmic string would topologically condense at this space-time sheet.

  3. Could most of matter be dark even in the case of Sun? What can we really say about the portion of the ordinary matter inside Sun? The total rate of nuclear fusion in the solar core depends on the density of ordinary matter and one can argue that existing model does not allow a considerable reduction of the portion of ordinary matter.

    There is however also another option - dark fusion - which would be at work in TGD based model of cold fusion (see this) (low energy nuclear reactions (LENR) is less misleading term) and also in TGD inspired biology (there is evidence for bio-fusion) as Pollack effect (see this), in which part of protons go to dark phase at magnetic flux tubes to form dark nuclear strings creating negatively charged exclusion zone). Dark fusion would give rise to dark proton sequences at magnetic flux tubes decaying by dark beta emission to beta stable nuclei and later to ordinary nuclei and releasing nuclear binding energy.

    Dark fusion could explain the generation of elements heavier than iron not possible in stellar cores (see this). Standard model assumes that they are formed in supernova explosions by so called r-process but empirical data do not support this hypothesis. In TGD Universe dark fusion could occur outside stellar interiors.

  4. But if heavier elements are formed via dark fusion, why the same could not be true for the lighter elements? The TGD based model of atomic nuclei represents nucleus as a string like object or several of them possibly linked and knotted. Thickened cosmic strings again! Nucleons would be connected by meson like bonds with quark and antiquark at their ends.

    This raises a heretic question: could also ordinary nuclear fusion rely on similar mechanism? Standard nuclear physics relies on potential models approximating nucleons with point like particles: this is of course the only thing that nuclear physicists of past could imagine as children of their time. Should the entire nuclear physics be formulated in terms of many-sheeted space-time concept and flux tubes? I have proposed this kind of formulation long time ago (see this). What would distinguish between ordinary and dark fusion would be the value of heff=n× h.

After this prelude it is possible to speculate about blackholes in the spirit of TGD .
  1. Also the interiors of blackholes would contain dark knots and have magnetic structure. This predicts unexpected features such as magnetic moments not possible for GRT blackholes. Also the matter inside blackhole would be dark (the TGD based explanation for Fermi bubbles assumes this (see this). Already the model for the first LIGO event explained the unexpected gamma ray bursts in terms of the twisting of rotating flux tubes as effect analogous to what causes sunspots: twisting and finally reconnection.

  2. One must also ask whether LIGO blackholes are actually dark stars with very small amount of ordinary matter. If the radius is indeed equal to Schwarschild radius rS= 2GM and mass is really what it is estimated to be rather than being systematically smaller, then the interpretation as TGD counterparts of blackholes makes sense. If mass is considerably smaller, the radius would be correspondingly large, and one would not have genuine blackhole. I do not however take this option too seriously.

  3. What about collisions of blackholes? Could they correspond to two knots moving along same string in opposite directions and colliding? Or two cosmic strings intersecting and forming a cosmic crossroad with second blackhole in the crossing? Or self-intersection of single cosmic string? In any case, cosmic traffic accident would be in question.

    The second LIGO event gave hints that the spin directions of the colliding blackholes were not the same. This does not conform with the assumption that binary blackhole system was in question. Since the spin direction would be naturally that of long cosmic string, this suggests that the traffic accident in cosmic cross road defined by intersection or self-intersection created the merger. Note that intersections tend to occur (think of moving strings in 3-D space) and could be stablized by gravitational attraction: two string world sheet at 4-D space-time surface have stable intersections just like strings in plane unless they reconnect.

See the article LIGO and TGD or the chapter Quantum astrophysics of "Physics in many-sheeted space-time".

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

Articles and other material related to TGD.

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