Astronomers probably just saw a black hole swallow a dead star
Ripples in the fabric of spacetime reveal what may be a first-of-its-kind cosmic collision.
Some 900 million years ago, a black hole released a terrible belch that echoed through the cosmos. On August 14, the resulting ripples in the fabric of spacetime passed through Earth—giving us the best evidence yet of a never-before-seen type of cosmic collision that could offer new insights on how the universe works.
The detection, called S190814bv, was likely triggered by the merger of a black hole and a neutron star, the ultra-dense leftovers of an exploded star. Though astronomers have long expected such binary systems to exist, they’ve never been seen by telescopes scanning the heavens for different wavelengths of light. (See the first image of a black hole's silhouette, made using a gigantic array of
