The Pink Buzz Team
Two blackholes that were estimated to be 66 times and 85 times the size of the Sun merged to form an even larger black hole.
The merger has been named GW190521.
The ripples of this event were observed on Earth on 21 May, 2019. This merger occurred 17.2 billion light years away. Do you know what a light year is? It is a unit of measuring distance in outer space.
One light year is the distance that light travels in one year. This distance is nearly 6 million million miles or 9.4607X1012 km!
A black hole is defined as a region in spacetime that has an immense gravitational pull. This force is so strong that no particle or even light can escape from it.
LIGO in the USA and Virgo in Italy are the main observatories that detect gravitational waves in outer space. Research groups at IIT-Gandhinagar and IIT-Bomaby played an important role in this discovery too. The data from this massive collision in space took over a year to be analyzed and confirmed. The final findings were published in two scientific journals on 2 September 2020.
Did you know, there is a black hole in the centre of our Galaxy?
The Milky Way is thought to have a black hole at its centre and its location is called Sagittarius A*.
