{"id":233540,"date":"2026-03-18T02:21:04","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T07:21:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/astronomers-may-have-seen-colliding-black-holes-trigger-a-blaze-of-light"},"modified":"2026-03-18T02:21:04","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T07:21:04","slug":"astronomers-may-have-seen-colliding-black-holes-trigger-a-blaze-of-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/astronomers-may-have-seen-colliding-black-holes-trigger-a-blaze-of-light","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers May Have Seen Colliding Black Holes Trigger a Blaze of Light"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/astronomers-may-have-seen-colliding-black-holes-trigger-a-blaze-of-light.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A brief blaze of gamma and X-ray light that lit up Earth telescopes in November 2024 may have come from an unexpected source.<\/p>\n<p>Just a few seconds earlier, from the same tiny corner of the sky, LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA had detected the telltale <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/gravitational-waves\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_self\">gravitational wave<\/a> signal of two <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/black-holes\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_self\">black holes<\/a> colliding. These massive events are some of the most extreme in the Universe; even so, they\u2019re not generally expected to produce detectable light.<\/p>\n<p>A team led by astronomer Shu-Rui Zhang of the University of Science and Technology of China has linked the extraordinary detection to an even more extraordinary set of possible circumstances: the collision, the researchers believe, may have taken place in the enormous, roiling disk of dust and gas surrounding a third, supermassive <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencealert.com\/black-holes\" rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_self\">black hole<\/a> \u2013 the host galaxy\u2019s active galactic nucleus (AGN).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A brief blaze of gamma and X-ray light that lit up Earth telescopes in November 2024 may have come from an unexpected source. Just a few seconds earlier, from the same tiny corner of the sky, LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA had detected the telltale gravitational wave signal of two black holes colliding. These massive events are some of [\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-233540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233540","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=233540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233540\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}