{"id":265631,"date":"2025-07-15T01:08:15","date_gmt":"2025-07-15T01:08:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/265631\/"},"modified":"2025-07-15T01:08:15","modified_gmt":"2025-07-15T01:08:15","slug":"merger-of-two-massive-black-holes-is-one-for-the-record-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/265631\/","title":{"rendered":"Merger of two massive black holes is one for the record books"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Physicists with the LIGO\/Virgo\/KAGRA collaboration have detected the gravitational wave signal (dubbed GW231123) of the most massive merger between two black holes yet observed, resulting in a new black hole that is 225 times more massive than our Sun. The results were presented at the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.iop.org\/events\/24th-international-conference-general-relativity-and-gravitation-16th-edoardo-amaldi\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves<\/a> in Glasgow, Scotland.<\/p>\n<p>The LIGO\/Virgo\/KAGRA collaboration searches the universe for gravitational waves produced by the mergers of black holes and neutron stars. <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/science\/2018\/10\/danish-physicists-claim-to-cast-doubt-on-detection-of-gravitational-waves\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">LIGO detects<\/a> gravitational waves via <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/science\/2017\/10\/ligos-gravitational-wave-detection-takes-home-a-nobel\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">laser interferometry<\/a>, using high-powered lasers to measure tiny changes in the distance between two objects positioned kilometers apart. LIGO has detectors in Hanford, Washington, and in Livingston, Louisiana. A third detector in Italy, Advanced Virgo, came online in 2016. In Japan, KAGRA is the first gravitational-wave detector in Asia and the first to be built underground. Construction began on LIGO-India in 2021, and physicists expect it will turn on sometime after 2025.<\/p>\n<p>To date, the collaboration has detected dozens of merger events since its first <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ligo.caltech.edu\/page\/press-release-2017-nobel-prize\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Nobel Prize-winning discovery<\/a>. Early detected mergers involved either two black holes or two neutron stars. \u00a0In 2021, LIGO\/Virgo\/KAGRA confirmed the detection of two separate &#8220;mixed&#8221; mergers between black holes and neutron stars.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>\n      A tour of Virgo. Credit: EGO-Virgo<\/p>\n<p>LIGO\/Virgo\/KAGRA started its fourth observing run in 2023, and by the following year <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/science\/2024\/04\/gravitational-waves-reveal-mystery-object-merging-with-a-neutron-star\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">had announced<\/a> the detection of a signal indicating a merger between two compact objects, one of which was most likely a neutron star. The other had an intermediate mass\u2014heavier than a neutron star and lighter than a black hole. It was the first gravitational-wave detection of a mass-gap object paired with a neutron star and hinted that the mass gap might be less empty than astronomers previously thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Physicists with the LIGO\/Virgo\/KAGRA collaboration have detected the gravitational wave signal (dubbed GW231123) of the most massive merger&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":265632,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3844],"tags":[70,413,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-265631","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114854579558676077","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/265632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}