Meet GW190521—a Black-Hole Merger for the Record Books

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Meet GW190521-a black-hole merger for the record books:

The LIGO/VIRGO collaboration has picked up a gravitational wave signal from another black-hole merger-and it's one for the record books.

The merger is the most massive and most distant yet detected by the collaboration, its signal traveling across the Universe for a billion years before reaching Earth. The merger also produced the most energetic signal detected thus far, showing up in the data as more of a "bang" than the usual "chirp." And the new black hole resulting from the merger is the rarest of all in terms of its intermediate mass (about 150 times as heavy as our Sun), making this the first direct observation of an intermediate-mass black hole.

[...] Details of this latest discovery, dubbed GW190521, appeared today in two concurrent papers published in Physical Review Letters and Astrophysical Journal Letters. The former details the discovery of the gravitational wave signal, while the latter discusses the signal's physical properties and its astrophysical implications.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.