A Black Hole Collided With Something That Shouldn’t Exist
The era of gravitational-wave astronomy is in full swing, and the results so far are absolutely thrilling. This summer, astronomers with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo detector picked up ripples in space-time that seemed to come from a black hole colliding with… something of an unusual size. The research detected “an object in the ‘mass gap,’ which is a sort of no-man’s-land between the heaviest neutron star and lightest black hole masses we’ve measured,” said astrophysicist Thankful Cromartie at the time. You can read about the discovery here.
