🧵 On 14 July 2025, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) collaboration announced to have detected GW231123, a gravitational wave signal generated by the merger of the two most massive black holes ever observed. With masses of approximately 100 and 140 times that of the Sun, these cosmic giants 🔭 🧪 #cosmology
Crazy how it looks like it’s in liquid, how the black holes move and disturb the objects nearby
Yes it's nuts.😍 I love rhe lensing effect it's so cool.
Minister denzil Carnegie shows up FIRST on your followers And on, 9 out of 10 people, that come up on my thread It looks like someone is tagging us. His site now reads as spam on bluesky
So that means that they habe lost 15 solar masses … by radiation? Oomph… 😳
Moi un nez de cochon.
Oink !
Reminds me of ultrasound guided IV placement. Doink Doink Doink.
I first saw an up close of a large dark animal's nose. Then when it was swirling, I saw 2 black olives in some dark liquid. Maybe I need better glasses 😄
Terrifying yet fascinating
Paleolithic hominid here, with a question for astrophysicists: Are the bright spots hovering on the periphery, seemingly oscillating forward and back…are those actually fixed stars behind the event, whose light is bent so extremely that it appears they’re in motion? If so, caveman mind blown
That's right, it's a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. We can even take advantage it to spot things very far away—and long ago—because the lenses can function as magnifiers for objects behind them: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHL0137...
Wow , that's cool !
Even my snoot is cosmic! You’re welcome hoomans! 🐶🌌
So then why do I want to boop it?
Perhaps we could also note the Trump's proposed 2026 budget cuts off one of LIGO's legs, so no more discoveries like this one.
This is exciting. While this is the largest merger observed to date, we’ve only been observing mergers for ~10 years. So statistically this event is unlikely to be particularly special. More likely it’s fairly routine. Now imagine what we may discover in the decades ahead.
As above, so below. #Astronomy #floweroflife
Science ROCKS !
BLACK HOLES AND TIME WARPS... Einstein~ Outrageous Legacy KIP S. THORNE Prologue: A Voyage among the Holes in which the reader, in a science fiction tale, encounters black holes and all their strange properties as best we understand them in the 1990.~ cosmos.astroscu.unam.mx/~sergio/temp...
WOW!
Nose of the cosmic puppy?
This is very appealing
Love the story but the two black holes are the largest to have been observed merging, but are not the largest... They are nowhere near the largest black holes. TON618 is the largest (pending verification of a new candidate called Phoenix A) at 66 billion dollar masses.
Sorry, think it was just a case of wording perhaps...
The thread clearly states that GW231123 involves the merger of the most massive BHs ever observed via gravitational waves, not the largest BHs ever, like TON618. The discovery is unique because of its direct detection via LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA, not because of its size compared to giants like TON618!
Probably a good thing to be far, far away from.
It's a cosmic canine's nose!
Did anyone else see a dog nose at first?
Yep!
Anyone else see a dog's nose?
Yes! I just commented! Haha
Looking like a cute little dog nose
The scale of this thing and the distance the waves travel is unbelievable. Thank you kip, ligo and all for this wonder. Many of the black holes we see, seem to be small or super big. Don't see many teenage / mid sizes ones really, are we able to detect them?
1/2 Yes, we can detect intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs, 100–100,000 solar masses), but they are less common. LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA are sensitive to black hole mergers between 5 and several hundred solar masses.
2/2 IMBHs (often 100–1,000 solar masses in gravitational waves) are rare, likely formed in dense environments. The final black hole of the GW231123 event (~225 solar masses) can be considered a rare example of an IMBH.
Fascinating and terrifying at the same time.
Are those stars by the black holes really being displaced as fast as it looks like they are or is it our perception of them moving based on distortion of the light waves?
The animation shows the distortion of light due to gravitational lensing, caused by the intense gravitational field of black holes. This effect bends light rays, creating the illusion of stars moving rapidly, but it's just a warping of space-time!
I don’t fully understand. What was the time frame?
The merger of the two black holes is estimated to have occurred at a distance of 2.3–13.4 billion light-years (billion years ago), but the gravitational wave signal GW231123, lasting about 0.1 seconds, was detected by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA on Nov. 23, 2023. The announcement was made on July 14, 2025.
Any time now would be good guys
I made the mistake of buying some beach front property right near there.
Diving right into the middle of that might fix me
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I thought it was a dog's nose for a second.
counter rotational lensing, let me count the ways!
I really, really want to boop the cosmic puppy snoot that is in the preview still frame. Probably -really- inadvisable...
Were they rotating like at 160,000 times the rotation speed of earth or something like that?
The black holes were spinning incredibly fast, probably at about 400,000 times Earth's rotational speed (according to the infographic from Simona J. Miller/Caltech).
This? Is a dog snoot. A cosmic dog snoot. Hehe *boop* Fr though, woah
2/ generated a final 225-solar-mass black hole, surpassing the previous record of 140 solar masses (GW190521, in 2021). This extraordinary event, captured on 23 Nov. 2023 during the fourth observing run, challenges our understanding of the universe and opens up new perspectives for astronomy.
15 solar masses converted to pure energy is a mind bending amount of raw power
So we can conclude the merger converted about 15 solar masses into energy that was radiated away as gravitational waves?
Your estimate is very close. The two black holes, with masses of about 100 and 140 solar masses, had a total mass of about 240 solar masses. The final BH has about 225 solar masses, suggesting that about 15 solar masses were radiated as gravitational waves.
3/ This discovery is revolutionary for the following reasons: - Black holes so massive are forbidden by standard models of stellar evolution, according to Mark Hannam from Cardiff University & a member of the LVK collaboration. One possible hypothesis is that they formed through successive mergers
4/ of smaller black holes. - The two black holes were rotating at speeds close to the limit predicted by Einstein's general relativity, making the signal complex to analyze and requiring advanced theoretical models.
5/ - According to Dave Reitze, the executive director of LIGO at Caltech, this observation reveals the fundamental and exotic nature of black holes, pushing detection technologies and theoretical models to the limit. How was this achieved? Since 2015, when LIGO first detected gravitational waves
6/ (from a merger that produced a 62-solar-mass BH), the LIGO (USA), Virgo (Italy), and KAGRA (Japan) observatories have identified approximately 300 black hole mergers, including over 200 in the fourth observing run that began in May 2023. These instruments detect tiny distortions in space-time
7/ caused by extreme cosmic events. GW231123 represents a limiting case that tests the capabilities of analysis and instrumentation. This discovery stimulates new questions about the formation of black holes and the evolution of the universe. "It will take years for the community to fully unravel
8/ this intricate signal pattern and all its implications," emphasizes Gregorio Carullo from the University of Birmingham. The data from GW231123 will be studied by researchers around the world. The event has been presented at the 24th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation
9/ and the 16th Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves in Glasgow (July 14–18, 2025) GW231123 is not just a record, but a window into extreme cosmic phenomena. More complex scenarios, such as as yet unknown cosmic interactions, could emerge, making this a crucial moment for science.
10/10 References ➡️ ligo.org/ligo-virgo-k... ➡️ ligo.org/wp-content/u... ➡️ ligo.org/detections/g... Video: 'Two Black Holes Merge into One' Animation created by SXS, the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) project (www.black-holes.org)
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My brain hurts. ❗
Freaking science!!!
