{"id":218362,"date":"2025-07-20T14:05:36","date_gmt":"2025-07-20T19:05:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/monster-black-hole-merger-is-biggest-ever-seen"},"modified":"2025-07-20T14:05:36","modified_gmt":"2025-07-20T19:05:36","slug":"monster-black-hole-merger-is-biggest-ever-seen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/monster-black-hole-merger-is-biggest-ever-seen","title":{"rendered":"Monster black hole merger is biggest ever seen"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/monster-black-hole-merger-is-biggest-ever-seen.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Physicists have detected the biggest ever merger of colliding black holes. The discovery has major implications for researchers\u2019 understanding of how such bodies grow in the Universe.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s super exciting,\u201d says Priyamvada Natarajan, a theoretical astrophysicist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who was not involved in the research. The merger was between black holes with masses too big for physicists to easily explain. \u201cWe\u2019re seeing these forbidden high-mass black holes,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n<p>The discovery was made by the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-023-01732-4\">Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory<\/a> (LIGO), a facility involving two detectors in the United States. It comes at a time when US funding for gravitational-wave detection faces devastating cuts. The results, released <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2507.08219\">as a preprint on the arXiv<\/a> server<sup><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-025-02212-7#ref-CR1\">1<\/a><\/sup>, were presented at the <a href=\"https:\/\/iop.eventsair.com\/gr24-amaldi16\/\">GR-Amaldi<\/a> gravitational-waves meeting in Glasgow, UK, on 14 July.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Physicists have detected the biggest ever merger of colliding black holes. The discovery has major implications for researchers\u2019 understanding of how such bodies grow in the Universe. \u201cIt\u2019s super exciting,\u201d says Priyamvada Natarajan, a theoretical astrophysicist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who was not involved in the research. The merger was between black [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218362\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}