On Nov. 23, 2023, both halves of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) — located in Washington and Louisiana — detected an unusual set of gravitational waves. These ripples in the fabric of space-time can be triggered by some of the universe's most powerful events, such as exploding stars and rapidly spinning neutron stars. But in this case, the signal, dubbed GW231123, originated from a pair of colliding black holes around 2 billion light-years from Earth.
The pair dwell in what astronomers call a "mass gap," meaning they are too large to be stellar-mass black holes, created by collapsing stars, but they are smaller than intermediate-mass black holes, which we still do not fully understand. Adding to the strangeness, the black holes were spinning much faster than expected when they smashed into each other.
Now, in a study published Aug. 25 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers propose a simpler, yet equally intriguing explanation for GW231123. They suggest that the signal from the merger was warped by a strange space-time phenomenon called gravitational lensing, which occurs when distant emissions pass through patches of distorted space-time bent by the gravity of massive foreground objects.
When black holes collide, they send out ripples in the fabric of space-time, dubbed gravitational waves, which can be detected by special observatories on Earth, such as LIGO. (Image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab)"Like light, gravitational waves can also be deflected, magnified and split into multiple signals by massive objects," study co-author Miguel Zumalacárregui, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany, said in a statement. "For gravitational waves, diffraction and interference effects give us an additional way to identify and study lensed signals."
This effect can create stunning spectacles, including halos of light known as Einstein rings, unusual cross-shaped structures, and multiple copies of a single light source. By studying these luminous curiosities, researchers can weigh the lensing objects, thus revealing hidden discrepancies caused by invisible dark matter and providing one of our best methods for studying this elusive substance.
The gravitational lensing of visible light can sometimes create luminous halos, dubbed Einstein rings. In these images, the lensing object is the bright spot at the center of the rings and the warped blue light is from a distant object, located directly behind the "lens." (The blue light has also been magnified, making it appear much brighter than it otherwise would.) (Image credit: NASA)
"If we assume that GW231123 was deflected and distorted by a compact object of about 190 to 850 solar masses — or by an extended structure such as a globular cluster — we can understand the observed high masses," study first author Srashti Goyal, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, said in the statement. "Moreover, the lensing interpretation does not require unusually high spins."
However, while the lensing of gravitational waves is theoretically possible, it has never been seen before. The new study is also purely theoretical — the researchers have no direct evidence of lensing, such as an accompanying Einstein ring — so more work is needed to show this may be what happened here, the researchers noted.
A new mystery
In most cases of gravitationally lensed light, the lensing object is something enormous, like a galaxy, which can be trillions of times more massive than the sun. But the researchers' models suggest that any potential lensing object here must be much smaller, and they have not been able to spot anything that fits the bill in between Earth and the origin point of GW231123.
RELATED STORIES"The nature of the lens remains a major mystery in our analysis, as individual compact lenses with 100 – 1,000 solar masses should be exceedingly rare," Zumalacárregui said. "Future work will need to establish whether such lenses can form, or whether an ensemble of lighter objects, including stars, can explain this event.
If the team can figure out what may have magnified the signal and prove that the space-time ripples have been warped, it could be transformational for future astronomy. If gravitational waves can be lensed, it opens up the possibility of studying ancient black hole mergers or similar cosmic events that would otherwise be too far away for us to detect. The researchers also think that analyzing the diffraction patterns of such signals could provide more clues to the elusive identity of dark matter.
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