Astronomers Found a 'Tsunami' of Gravitational Waves & Their Origin

Cosmic winds are about to blow us all away (figuratively speaking, of course). Astronomers have pulled in the biggest haul of black hole events: The last series of gravitational waves observed were the largest collection yet, with a colossal 35 gravitational wave events monitored in five months, between November 2019 to March 2020, using the LIGO-Virgo interferometers. The biggest haul. Taking the average, this means nearly 1.7 gravitational wave events were identified, per week. And it's a sharp jump in frequency from the 1.5-event weekly average identified during the previous run, ballooning the total number of events detected since the first one in September 2015, to 90. A fatal cosmic dance. Thirty-two of the 35 additional detections were likely created from mergers of black hole pairs, which happens when two black holes move into a close enough orbit for their mutual forces of gravity to pull them into one another. The collision is violent, sending blinding light far beyond the visible spectrum outward, and twisting the very fabric of spacetime into colossal waves that can span unimaginable distances. Afterwards, only a singular, gigantic black hole remains the sum of the earlier two. And the gravitational waves continue outward like ripples in a pond, all the way to Earth, where astronomers can monitor the event, and analyze the properties of the now-merged black holes. On a collision course. The recent series of black holes monitored spanned a wide range of black hole masses, the most massive of which was roughly 87 times the sun's. This one merged with another that was 61 times the sun's mass, and the new one that formed from the collision was 141 times the sun's mass. In another case, a different merger event created a black hole 104 times the sun's mass.  Both of these cases fall into the class of intermediate black holes, which includes those with a mass from 100 to one million times the sun's mass. Few black holes have been detected of this size. This series of observations is endlessly fascinating, and there's much more to explore in the preprint study. But as gravitational wave detectors continue to study the death and mergers of black holes, we learn more about how the most violent and mysterious forces in the universe come into being.