‘It’s mindboggling!’: astronomers detect most powerful black-hole collision yet

Astronomers have detected the most powerful, most distant and most perplexing collision of black holes yet using gravitational waves. Of the two behemoths that fused when the Universe was half its current age, at least one — weighing 85 times as much as the Sun — has a mass that was thought to be too large to be involved in such an event. And the merger produced a black hole of nearly 150 solar masses, the researchers have estimated, putting it in a range where no black holes had ever been conclusively seen before.

Nature 585, 171-172 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02524-w

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Subjects

• Physics
• Astronomy and astrophysics

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