LIGO Detects Most Massive Black Hole Merger to Date

 Hey, Space Placers!

At LIGO Hanford, WA

Greg Redfern

I was privileged to interview Nobel Prize Winner Dr. Rainer Weiss

Greg Redfern

It has been 10 years since it was announced that gravitational waves (GW), predicted by Albert Einstein in 1915, were discovered.

Since then 100's of GW events have been discovered.

The recent announcement that the most massive binary Black Hole merger to date had been discovered made big news in the GW-Astrophysics community. 

An infographic detailing the new GW231123 black hole merger.

Credit: Simona J. Miller / Caltech

Why? 

As explained in the article, ""This is the most massive black hole binary we've observed through gravitational waves, and it presents a real challenge to our understanding of black hole formation," says Mark Hannam of Cardiff University and a member of the LVK Collaboration. "Black holes this massive are forbidden through standard stellar evolution models. One possibility is that the two black holes in this binary formed through earlier mergers of smaller black holes."

More GW events will be discovered and plans are underway for a space-based GW detector called LISA :

LISA has three spacecraft that form an equilateral triangle in space where the sides of the triangle, also called LISA's "arms", extend about a million miles. Therefore, from space, LISA can avoid the noise from Earth and access regions of the spectrum that are inaccessible from Earth due to these extremely long arms. The gravitational wave sources that LISA would discover include ultra-compact binaries in our Galaxy, supermassive black hole mergers, and extreme mass ratio inspirals, among other exotic possibilities.

NASA and ESA are collaborating on LISA.

Much more to come regarding GWs. 

Sky Guy in VA