{"id":224875,"date":"2025-11-11T00:19:38","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T06:19:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/impossible-merger-of-two-massive-black-holes-explained"},"modified":"2025-11-11T00:19:38","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T06:19:38","slug":"impossible-merger-of-two-massive-black-holes-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/impossible-merger-of-two-massive-black-holes-explained","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Impossible\u2019 merger of two massive black holes explained"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/impossible-merger-of-two-massive-black-holes-explained.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In 2023, astronomers <a href=\"https:\/\/www.simonsfoundation.org\/2025\/07\/21\/gravitational-waves-reveal-most-massive-black-hole-merger-ever-detected\/?swcfpc=1\" target=\"_blank\">detected a huge collision<\/a>. Two unprecedentedly massive black holes had crashed an estimated 7 billion light-years away. The enormous masses and extreme spins of the black holes puzzled astronomers. Black holes like these were not supposed to exist.<\/p>\n<p>Now, astronomers with the Flatiron Institute\u2019s Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) and their colleagues have figured out just how these black holes may have formed and collided. The astronomers\u2019 comprehensive simulations\u2014which follow the system from the lives of the parent stars through to their ultimate death\u2014uncovered the missing piece that previous studies had overlooked: magnetic fields.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNo one has considered these systems the way we did; previously, astronomers just took a shortcut and neglected the magnetic fields,\u201d says Ore Gottlieb, astrophysicist at the CCA and lead author of <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3847\/2041-8213\/ae0d81\" target=\"_blank\">the new study<\/a> on the work published in <i>The Astrophysical Journal Letters<\/i>. \u201cBut once you consider magnetic fields, you can actually explain the origins of this unique event.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 2023, astronomers detected a huge collision. Two unprecedentedly massive black holes had crashed an estimated 7 billion light-years away. The enormous masses and extreme spins of the black holes puzzled astronomers. Black holes like these were not supposed to exist. Now, astronomers with the Flatiron Institute\u2019s Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) and their colleagues [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,33,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-cosmology","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224875","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=224875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224875\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}