Black hole clues hope from third gravity wave find

GRAVITATIONAL waves, which are ripples in the fabric of space-time generated by cataclysmic cosmic events, have been detected for the third time, scientists have announced.

As with the first two cases, an international team of researchers, including British scientists, detected the phenomenon while observing two black holes colliding to form a larger black hole, a century after Albert Einstein predicted their existence.

Scientists detected them using laser beams fired through two perpendicular pipes, each four kilometres long, nearly 2,000 miles apart in the US.

According to the astronomers, the newly-formed black hole is 49 times the mass of the Sun and is three billion light years away from Earth.

Gravitational waves were first observed in September 2015 and the second detection came three months later.

The third detection was made on January 4 this year.

The scientists believe their latest finding “provides clues about the directions in which the black holes are spinning”.

One of the researchers, Dr Christopher Berry, of the University of Birmingham, said: “Black holes are beautifully simple.

“You just need two numbers to describe them completely: a mass, how much they bend space-time, and a spin, how much spacetime swirls about them.

“But it takes lots of hard work to measure these from our data.

“We now have wonderful mass measurements and are starting to uncover details about the spins of these black holes, which could reveal hints about how they formed.”