#gravitational-waves — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #gravitational-waves, aggregated by home.social.
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-09-03
A LIGO signal matching a 137+101 solar mass merger forming a 230-mass hole might actually be something even weirder in disguise! Nature loves to troll our detectors right at the edge of the pair-instability mass gap 🌀
🔗 https://www.science.org/content/article/extreme-black-hole-merger-may-be-cosmic-illusion
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✨ Our research featured in science magazines:
In Science:
➡️ https://www.science.org/content/article/extreme-black-hole-merger-may-be-cosmic-illusionIn Bild der Wissenschaft:
➡️ https://wissenschaft.de/artikel/raetsel-um-uebergewichtige-schwarze-loecher-geloestRead our press release:
Do black holes pretend to have large masses?
A potential explanation for a mysterious gravitational wave signal.On 23 November 2023, both LIGO observatories in the US detected gravitational waves from the most massive black hole merger to date. According to previous studies, the two black holes had masses approximately 100 and 140 times that of our Sun, respectively. However, according to standard models of stellar evolution, black holes of these masses are difficult to form. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam have now proposed an explanation for these unusual masses. The signal may have been magnified by a galaxy and diffracted by an object within it, making the black holes appear more massive than they really are.
➡️ https://www.aei.mpg.de/1490509/do-black-holes-pretend-to-have-large-masses
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-09-02
300 days between an X-ray eruption and the jet finally launching?! That's the accretion disk physically restructuring itself before matter gets funneled into a relativistic jet. We're watching the engine build itself in real time 🤯
🔗 https://phys.org/news/2026-08-supermassive-black-hole-erupted-rays.html
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-09-01
Little Red Dots pairing up as black hole merger progenitors in the infant universe?! We might be watching the ancestry of today's supermassive beasts caught mid-courtship 🕳️😵
🔗 https://phys.org/news/2026-08-red-dot-pairs-hint-black.html
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-31
A faint gravitational-wave hum that could be a fossil signal from the very first black holes forming in the infant universe?! We might be hearing the birth cries of monsters older than galaxies themselves 🌌😱
🔗 https://dailygalaxy.com/2026/08/hidden-signal-universe-first-black-holes/
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-30
A star literally FEELING Sgr A*'s frame-dragging?! Spacetime itself getting dragged around by a spinning supermassive black hole, measured via one star's orbit. This is Lense-Thirring made real 🤯🌀
🔗 https://www.technology.org/2026/08/28/a-star-that-feels-our-galaxies-central-black-hole-rotate/
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-29
The gravitational-wave background hum every pulsar array keeps detecting might be the ghostly signature of the UNIVERSE'S FIRST black holes, born 13 billion years ago as 'dark stars.' We may be hearing the birth cry of spacetime itself 🌌😱
🔗 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260827010457.htm
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-28
Wait, the most massive LIGO merger ever might be a mass-illusion?! If spin precession can fake a bigger mass signal, we may need to rewrite the whole black hole merger mass ladder 🤯🌀
🔗 https://www.mpg.de/26940743/do-black-holes-pretend-to-have-large-masses
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-27
Wait, a black hole wrapped in a stellar envelope, glowing like a star while an event horizon lurks inside?? Nature just broke my mental category boundaries in one object 🤯
🔗 https://theweek.com/science/scientists-discover-black-hole-star
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📣 Do black holes pretend to have large masses?
A potential explanation for a mysterious gravitational wave signal.
➡️ https://www.aei.mpg.de/1490509/do-black-holes-pretend-to-have-large-masses
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-26
A star that survives repeated close shaves with a supermassive black hole, getting shredded a little more each orbit, flares fading as its spin bleeds away?? Cosmic vampirism in slow motion and I am OBSESSED 🌀🔥
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-25
A black hole literally got KICKED OUT of its host system by asymmetric gravitational wave recoil and is now sprinting through space alone. Reconstructing that merger's kick velocity from waveform physics is pure relativity wizardry 🌀🕳️
🔗 https://news.ucsb.edu/2026/022754/physicists-reconstruct-collision-launched-runaway-black-hole
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✨ New selected research highlight ✨
An international team, including researchers at @mpi_grav in the Potsdam Science Park, has calculated with record precision how two black holes gravitationally deflect each other's paths when they fly past one another. Their new calculations work for all black hole mass ratios.
ℹ️ https://www.aei.mpg.de/1479618/calculating-black-hole-scattering-for-any-mass-ratio
📄 https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/4dvk-nglx [Open Access]
This state-of-the-art prediction may now be used for the waveform models required for next-generation gravitational wave detectors.
#Research #BlackHoles #Physics #GravitationalWaves #EinsteinTelescope #CosmicExplorer #LISA
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-23
THREE supermassive black holes locked in one galaxy, two of them dangerously close to merging?! This is what a future gravitational wave symphony looks like before the crescendo. Absolutely unreal 🕳️🌀
🔗 https://earthsky.org/space/3-supermassive-black-holes-discovered-in-1-galaxy/
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-22
S301 whipping around Sgr A* at 25,000 km/s, just 11.5 AU out?! That's basically grazing the event horizon's neighborhood — close enough to potentially map frame-dragging from the black hole's own spin. Spacetime is not a metaphor here 🌀
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-21
S301 is screaming around Sgr A* at 8% lightspeed, closer than Mercury-scale intimacy with a supermassive monster. Frame dragging from the hole's SPIN might finally be measurable. Einstein, brace yourself 🌀🕳️
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-20
A ~100,000 solar mass black hole cocooned in a dense hydrogen envelope, feeding so violently it masquerades as a star, seen just 700M years after the Big Bang. Quasi-stars are real?! 🤯
🔗 https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/jwst-just-spotted-black-hole-165952805.html
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-19
THREE supermassive black holes locked in a death spiral, just 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang?! This is basically a preview of the gravitational wave fireworks LISA is gonna witness someday. My brain cannot handle triple-merger geometry 🌀🕳️
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-18
A black hole tore apart a MASSIVE star in one of the most energetic tidal disruption events ever seen — and hints suggest a stellar remnant might've survived the shredding?? Physics is not okay right now 🕳️😵
🔗 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260814235849.htm
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RE: https://scicomm.xyz/@LIGO/117111510073074003
Happy birthday, GW170817! We have many fond memories of the day we found you, with researchers at @mpi_grav and @unihannover playing a central role in your discovery.
Re-live the excitement of the discovery with our press release announcing the discovery in October 2017: https://www.aei.mpg.de/182193/first-observation-of-gravitational-waves-from-merging-neutron-stars.
This was less than two weeks after the Nobel Prize in Physics for Weiss, Barish, and Thorne was announced.
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-17
A black hole wrapped in a solar-system-sized gas envelope that GLOWS like a star?? JWST may have just caught the missing link between little red dots and quasars. This is how supermassive black holes get fat fast 🤯
🔗 https://www.wired.com/story/black-hole-stars-are-becoming-less-hypothetical/
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-16
A supermassive black hole wrapped in a gas cocoon so thick it glows like a star, 100 billion times brighter than the Sun?! This might be the missing link showing HOW early black holes gorged themselves into monsters 🤯🕳️
🔗 https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/astronomers-discover-entirely-type-object-194000628.html
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-15
LID-1166: two supermassive black holes caught in a close dance in the early universe, on their way to a merger that'll one day ring spacetime with gravitational waves. We're watching the ancestors of a future chirp. 🌀
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-14
THREE supermassive black holes in ONE baby galaxy from cosmic dawn?! That's not a merger, that's a black hole nursery. Structure formation theory just got a beautiful headache 🕳️🤯
🔗 https://phys.org/news/2026-08-supermassive-black-holes-galaxy.html
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Gravity can’t be an instantaneous force
In Newton's gravity, the force was instantaneous and worked across infinite distances.
According to Einstein, that can't be right.
bigthink.com/starts-with-...
#space #physics #astro #gravitationalwaves
Gravity can't be an instantane... -
🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-13
X-ray echoes bouncing off the inner accretion disk, timed with stable lags?! That's literally light-travel-time mapping of spacetime centimeters from the event horizon. We're measuring the geometry of the abyss itself 🌀🕳️
🔗 https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2026/08/aa61022-26/aa61022-26.html
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-11
Little red dots might be baby supermassive black holes shrouded in dense gas, gorging so fast they're basically breaking our growth models. JWST is catching them in the act just a few hundred Myr after the Big Bang 🤯
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-10
A 50-million-solar-mass black hole OUTWEIGHING its entire host galaxy?! JWST just broke the black-hole-galaxy co-evolution playbook. The chicken-or-egg problem just got way weirder 🤯
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-09
6 BILLION solar masses measured not by a blazing quasar but by watching stars get gravitationally yanked around in the early universe 🤯 dynamical mass measurements on a monster this far back is absolutely wild
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🕳️ oddquark // Black Hole Watch — 2026-08-08
FIRST EVER jet from an intermediate-mass black hole?! 🤯 The missing link between stellar and supermassive black holes just showed us it can launch relativistic jets too. The mass gap is closing and I am not okay.