[ExI] LIGO detects the largest black hole merger yet

[John Clark]

In today's issue of Physical Review Letters the two Lego detectors in the
US and the Virgo detector in Italy announced they had detected on May 21
2019 the gravitational waves from the merger of two Black Holes of 65 and
85 Solar masses which produced a Black Hole of 142 solar masses with 8
solar masses of matter being converted into the energy of gravitational
waves. It was the largest merger of Black Holes ever detected by
gravitational waves and one of the most distant at 11.3 billion light
years. An optical counterpart of this merger seems to have also been
detected so it must've happened in a region rich in gas and dust.

It's not clear how the two progenitor black holes could've been made, 65
solar masses is really big, it's pushing the edge of the possible for a
single supergiant star to have produced according to our current
understanding of stellar evolution, and it's hard to see how they could
have themselves been formed by mergers 11.3 billion years ago of smaller
Black Holes in the short amount of time since the Big Bang. But science
thrives on mystery.

A Binary Black Hole Merger with a Total Mass of 150 Suns
<https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.101102>

John K Clark
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