The largest black hole yet detected was detected today, and it’s super big news for a lot of reasons!

Some exciting information about GW190521 below!

[image credit: Deborah Ferguson, Karan Jani, Deirdre Shoemaker, Pablo Laguna, Georgia Tech, MAYA Collaboration]

The resultant black hole is an intermediate black hole, one that we knew might be possible, but have not seen via light or gravity wave detections. The detection comes from when the universe was about half the age it is now, or about 6 to 7 billion years ago.

That makes this the furthest gravity wave detection that has ever been made! We can tell it’s age based on its distance. Gravity travels at the same speed as light. That means if we detect this black hole 7 billion light years away, it happened 7 billion years ago!

There have been no theories as of yet to describe the origin of black holes for 100x-1000x sun masses. That makes this black hole (being just a little over 100x sun masses) the first of its kind that we have ever detected and brings new challenges to previous models!

And the gravity waves that were generated have an energy equivalent to ~8x the mass of the sun. That means the resultant black hole lost about 8x the mass of the sun making these waves in its collision!

This detection is so cool!!! With tools like @LIGO and @ego_virgo we can see little wibbles and wobbles in space-time comparable to the width of subatomic particles, like protons. The scientists behind these tools are helping to give us a new understanding of the universe.

You can read more info from an amazingly cool scientist in this thread, too! https://twitter.com/starstrickensf/status/1301191881808723969