The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory has detected its third confirmed black hole merger, and this one’s a doozy: LIGO’s latest discovery is about 3 billion light-years away, which is more than twice as far away as the first two finds.
The gravitational wave signature of the newly reported smash-up, known as GW170104, also confirms that there’s a heavyweight class for stellar-mass black holes.
“It clearly establishes a new population of black holes that were not known before LIGO,” said Bangalore Sathyaprakash, a physicist at Penn State and Cardiff University.
