When two black holes collide, the impact releases enormous energy in the form of gravitational waves. These waves can now be measured with LIGO and its sister detectors, Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan.
Details of GW250114
According to Maximiliano Isi, assistant professor of astronomy at Columbia University, the merging black holes were each 30 to 35 times the mass of the sun. After orbiting each other in a near-perfect circle, they fused into a new black hole about 63 solar masses, spinning at a dizzying 100 revolutions per second.
“The black holes were about 1 billion light-years away,” Isi explained. “Now, because the instruments have improved so much since then, we can see these two black holes with much greater clarity as they approached each other and merged into a single one.”
Black Hole Collision Dynamics of Space and Time
LIGO’s detection is precise enough to capture changes in distance 1,000 times smaller than the radius of an atom’s nucleus. With more than 300 black hole mergers now observed, researchers are deepening their understanding of the cosmos.
