Tousif Islam

When two heavy bodies collide, they don't always stay put. Merging black holes get a powerful kick, like the recoil of a gun, but instead of gunpowder, it's the curvature of spacetime doing the work. This kick can send the new hole flying out of a galaxy's center or even beyond its outskirts.

When black holes collide, the very fabric of spacetime trembles. That rumble, gravitational waves, gets picked up by detectors, but decoding the signal used to take hours of computer simulation.

Two black holes circle in a cosmic dance, spiraling closer together. In the end, they merge into one, and that moment unleashes a powerful burst of gravitational waves, ripples in spacetime itself. But what remains after the merger?