Bang goes one theory as black holes collide

A MONSTER black hole could help to solve – or deepen – one of space’s biggest mysteries.

It was created by the collision of two smaller black holes in one of the biggest explosions ever detected, seen for just a tenth of a second as four quick ‘wiggles’ across a computer screen.

Astronomers say it is 142 times the mass of the Sun and was formed 17billion light years from Earth, when the universe was half as old as it is now.

Gravitational waves from the blast 7billion years ago were detected last year at observatories in the US and Italy.

But while the collision backs up some of our theories about black holes, it confounds others. The existence of black holes – caused when stars collapse and become so dense no light can escape – was predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity. Einstein also postulated the existence of gravitational waves – disturbances in the curvature of spacetime which were first observed in 2015.

Astronomers had thought there were only small black holes, about ten to 60 times the size of our Sun, and supermassive black holes millions of times larger, caused when huge clouds of gas collapsed during the formation of the universe. Until now there has been little evidence of a ‘Goldilocks’ black hole between these sizes.

But one of the black holes in the collision was believed to be 85 times the size of the Sun – too big to have resulted from a single collapsing star. Scientists say it may therefore have itself resulted from a collision, meaning black holes could keep colliding until they form supermassive black holes, like the one at the centre of our Milky Way.

Dr Patricia Schmidt of the University of Birmingham, part of the team that worked on the discovery, said: ‘These findings could help to solve the mystery of how supermassive black holes at the heart of many galaxies are formed. This is the first intermediate black hole that we have directly observed and we are excited about what future observations might reveal.’