Black holes found growing through mergers in busy star clusters

The heaviest black holes are built by merging smaller ones, 153 mergers show

Some black holes appear to be made of other black holes. A study of 153 collisions detected as ripples in spacetime finds that the universe’s heaviest black holes were not forged in the death of a single massive star, the route textbooks describe, but assembled step by step through earlier mergers. If the result holds, the cosmos runs something like a recycling line for its most extreme objects. The evidence is a break in the numbers. When astro…

Black holes found growing through mergers in busy star clusters

New Delhi: Globular clusters are the building blocks of galaxies, and consists of thousands and even millions of stars in a roughly spherical association under the influence of mutual gravity. These are densely populated ancient star clusters, where repeated, violent collisions produce increasingly more massive black holes. Researchers analysed the entire catalogue of detections by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA network of gravitational wave events, conta…