Fasten Your Seatbelts: Gravity Around Black Holes gets Bumpy

New research shows that despite contrary belief, the gravitational fields around black holes might eddy and swirl, adding a bit extra bumpiness.

While a little up and down, side-to-side tossing may be the least worrisome thing when thinking about a never-ending black abyss, it still surprised researchers, who thought black holes had a relatively smooth ride.

"For many years, the folklore among physicists was that gravity could not be turbulent," researcher Luis Lehner noted in a Perimeter Institute press release.

Researchers believe that gravity behaves like a fluid. Fluids can be turbulent under certain conditions, so why can't gravity? There is clearly something amiss with the gravity/fluids duality.

"Either there was a problem with the duality and gravity really can't be fully captured by a fluid description, or there was a new phenomenon in gravity and turbulent gravity really can exist," Lehner said.

"There might be turbulence if you confine gravity in a box, essentially," he added. "The deeper question is whether this can happen in a realistic situation."

The team decided to study fast-spinning black holes, because a fluid-dynamics description of such holes hints that the spacetime around them is less viscous than the spacetime around other kinds of black holes. Low viscosity means more of a chance of turbulence.

Researchers were stunned upon their analysis.

"Over the past few years, we have gone from a serious doubt about whether gravity can ever go turbulent, to pretty high confidence that it can," Lehner said.

Scientists were able to unlock this hidden behavior because they - for the first time - conducted a non-linear study; gravitational systems are rarely analyzed at this level of detail.

This study is of course theoretical, but soon next-generation detectors may come out that are able to detect differences in gravitational waves, proving the existence of black hole turbulence.