Biggest black hole merger EVER detected has created terrifying ‘monster' that's 225 times as massive as our Sun
HOLE-Y SMOKES Biggest black hole merger EVER detected has created terrifying 'monster' that's 225 times as massive as our Sun
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SCIENTISTS have discovered the biggest black hole merger ever recorded, as two massive spacetime ripples spiral into each other.
The monstrous collision occurred on the outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy, and produced a black hole roughly 225 times more massive than the sun.
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Aerial shot of the advanced LIGO gravitational detector in Livingston, Louisiana - one of the four LVK Collaboration detectors
Credit: Alamy
Before now, the most massive black hole merger had a total mass of 140 suns.
The new collision event, dubbed GW231123, was found by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration - a group of four detectors that identify cataclysmic cosmic events.
Each black hole was roughly 100 to 140 times the mass of our Sun before they combined.
"This is the most massive black hole binary we've observed through gravitational waves, and it presents a real challenge to our understanding of black hole formation," Mark Hannam, of Cardiff University and a member of the LVK Collaboration, said in a statement.
"Black holes this massive are forbidden through standard stellar evolution models.
"One possibility is that the two black holes in this binary formed through earlier mergers of smaller black holes."
Evidence of the GW231123 event was discovered in late 2023, when two slight distortions in spacetime were spotted by laser detectors in Louisiana and Washington.
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The black holes are moving so fast they are too difficult to properly analyse
Credit: Alamy
The signal that arrived at the detectors was coming from two high-mass black holes that were spinning rapidly - meaning they were hard to analyse.
Charlie Hoy, of the University of Portsmouth and also a member of the LVK, explained: "The black holes appear to be spinning very rapidly - near the limit allowed by Einstein's theory of general relativity.
"That makes the signal difficult to model and interpret.
"It's an excellent case study for pushing forward the development of our theoretical tools."
Horrifying black hole simulation shows what 'spaghettification' looks like when objects fall into 'extreme slurp'
Researchers say they need to observe more similar, high-spin mergers to better calculate just how massive this most recent black hole merger is.
Gregorio Carullo, of the University of Birmingham and a member of the LVK, noted: "It will take years for the community to fully unravel this intricate signal pattern and all its implications.
"Despite the most likely explanation remaining a black hole merger, more complex scenarios could be the key to deciphering its unexpected features."
The researchers are set to present their findings at the 24th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation (GR24) and the 16th Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves in Glasgow, Scotland this week.
Black holes are formed through the collapse of massive stars or through the merging of smaller black holes.
Known black holes currently fall into just two categories: stellar-mass black holes, which range from a few to a few dozen times the Sun's mass; and supermassive black holes, which can be anywhere from about 100,000 to 50 billion times as massive as the Sun.
Intermediate-mass black holes fall into the gap of these two mass ranges and are physically unable to form from direct star collapse and are incredibly rare.
Astrophysicists reckon these rare types of black holes grow from merging with others that are similar in size - like our most recent collision event.
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Researchers say they need to observe more similar, high-spin mergers to better calculate just how massive this most recent black hole merger is
Credit: Alamy
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