These black holes collided so hard they made space-time jiggle
Artist’s impression of binary black holes about to collide. (Mark Myers, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav)/)Some 7 billion light-years away, two black holes swirled closer and closer together over eons until they crashed together with a furious bang, creating a new black hole in the process. This disturbance in the cosmos caused space-time to stretch, collapse, and even jiggle, producing ripples known as gravitational waves which reached our Earthly abode on May 21st of 2019.Using LIGO (Laser Interferometry Gravitational-wave Observatory), a pair of identical, two-and-a-half-mile-long interferometers in the United States, and Virgo, a roughly two-mile-long detector in Italy, an international team of scientists announced Wednesday that they had detected this cosmic collision, and it’s racking up superlatives: it’s the biggest, the farthest, and the most energetic black hole merger observed to date. This is also the first definite sighting of an intermediate-sized black hole, clocking in...