{"id":221705,"date":"2025-09-11T04:31:39","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T09:31:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/first-ever-complete-measurement-of-a-black-hole-recoil-achieved-thanks-to-gravitational-waves"},"modified":"2025-09-11T04:31:39","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T09:31:39","slug":"first-ever-complete-measurement-of-a-black-hole-recoil-achieved-thanks-to-gravitational-waves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/first-ever-complete-measurement-of-a-black-hole-recoil-achieved-thanks-to-gravitational-waves","title":{"rendered":"First-ever complete measurement of a black-hole recoil achieved thanks to gravitational waves"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/first-ever-complete-measurement-of-a-black-hole-recoil-achieved-thanks-to-gravitational-waves.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A team of researchers led by the Instituto Galego de F\u00edsica de Altas Enerx\u00edas (IGFAE) from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) has measured for the first time the speed and direction of the recoil of a newborn black hole formed through the merger of two others. The result, published today in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41550-025-02632-5\" target=\"_blank\">journal <i>Nature Astronomy<\/i><\/a>, offers new insights into some of the most extreme events in the universe.<\/p>\n<p>Gravitational waves (GWs) are ripples in the fabric of spacetime that travel away from their sources at the speed of light, encoding information about them. They provide a completely novel information channel that allows us to observe astrophysical phenomena that do not emit light\u2014such as black hole mergers\u2014and obtain new information about processes that do\u2014such as supernovae or neutron-star mergers.<\/p>\n<p>While Einstein predicted the existence of GWs in 1916, they are so weak that detecting them requires incredibly sensitive detectors and extremely violent astrophysical events such as black-hole mergers, supernovae or the Big Bang itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A team of researchers led by the Instituto Galego de F\u00edsica de Altas Enerx\u00edas (IGFAE) from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) has measured for the first time the speed and direction of the recoil of a newborn black hole formed through the merger of two others. The result, published today in the journal [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-221705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221705","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\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221705\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}