An artist's impression of two black holes merging. (Image credit: AiVreaSaStii/pixabay)
Researchers have discovered the largest black hole merger in history – a colossal collision of two massive rips in space-time that spiral around each other. It could point to the most mysterious type of black hole in the universe.
The merger, which occurred at the edges of our Milky Way galaxy, created a black hole with a mass approximately 225 times that of the Sun.
That’s nearly twice the previous record, which was created by the last black hole, which had a mass of about 142 solar masses. The new event was detected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) collaboration, a combination of four detectors that detect catastrophic cosmic events by the gravitational waves they produce. Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were first predicted by Albert Einstein and confirmed by LIGO in 2015. The physicists involved in the study were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2017 for their groundbreaking discovery.
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Sourse: www.livescience.com
