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LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA detectors act like giant microphones, listening in on gravitational waves — vibrations of space itself. The new GWTC-5.0 catalog recorded 161 black hole mergers, bringing the total count to 390 events. Each such signal is an echo of a cosmic duet that ends with the birth of a single massive black hole.
The instruments' sensitivity grew so much that one signal, GW250114_082203, turned out to be 76 times louder than usual, like a whisper turning into an orchestra. This allowed us to weigh the participants with unprecedented precision: their masses range from 5 to 70 solar masses. Among them, a record light one was caught, just 5 solar masses, nearly the theoretical minimum for black holes. Such objects force us to refine the boundary between black holes and ultra-dense neutron stars.
These observations directly check how mass curves space — exactly according to the recipe of Albert Einstein. The dreams of detectors' creators Rainer Weiss and Kip Thorne about such precision are becoming routine.
Every few minutes, somewhere in the universe, black holes collide, producing a gravitational wave, the cosmos literally hums with such events.
