An international team has detected gravitational waves from the most massive black hole collision ever seen — but at least one of the black holes should not exist, according to science.
Instead of the telltale "chirp" of two black holes spiralling in towards each other, the sensitive instruments captured just a blip in the moment before the holes collided.
The event is also special because at least one of the original black holes shouldn't have existed at all, said Isobel Romero-Shaw, a PhD candidate at Monash University who was also involved in the discovery. The smaller black hole is right on the edge of the plausible range of an object created by the collapse of a star.
"They merge again and again and again until you get something that's somewhere in between the masses of the Sun and theAnother "more exotic" hypothesis is that they formed from primordial black holes from the early universe. "One of the options you have for creating binary black holes, that then go on to merge, is you have two stars that are born together, evolve together and die together and then merge as black holes later on," Ms Romero-Shaw said.
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