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

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

‘Mindboggling’ black-hole collision

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 in which no black holes had ever been conclusively seen before. “Everything about this discovery is mindboggling,” says computational astrophysicist Simon Portegies Zwart.

Nature | 5 min readReference: Physical Review Letters paper & The Astrophysical Journal Letters paper