And he hopes his work will offer new specimens of black holes for the LIGO to seek out. Extreme, or extremal, black holes are defined as having the fastest possible spin or charge allowed by Einstein’s relativity. Back in 2012, Stefanos Aretakis, working at the University of Cambridge, first suggested that such black holes are unstable when disturbed. In an earlier paper, they argued that such black holes could be detected by LIGO. These curvature invariants are mathematical quantities that describe the "shape" of spacetime around the black hole.

Source: Forbes May 27, 2018 14:15 UTC