The Universe is no longer silent. Astronomers have opened the black box of the Cosmos, discovering hundreds of black hole collisions where previously there appeared to be only a vacuum. This is not just an ordinary report - it is an official admission that our understanding of the life and death of stars is collapsing. Spacetime is vibrating from the collisions of monsters, the mass of which makes the laws of physics beg for mercy.
Gravitational noise
Imagine throwing a brick into an absolutely calm lake. The ripples that spread are gravitational waves, only the "brick" weighs as much as thirty suns and, instead of water, it is the very fabric of the Universe. Albert Einstein predicted this as early as 1915, but later dismissed it, saying that humanity could never create instruments capable of detecting it. He was wrong. Today, the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA detectors "hear" cosmic catastrophes three to four times a week.
"The discovery of such a large number of signals marks a transition from studying individual anomalies to full-scale statistics," said physicist Dmitry Lapshin. The new GWTC-5.0 catalog is a real jackpot. It includes 161 new signals recorded between April 2024 and January 2025. Our "archive" now includes 390 mergers. Scientists are certain that what they have found is akin to the discovery of a lost civilization, as they have begun to understand the behavior of ancient galaxies and their dark inhabitants!
Recurrent black holes
Physicists have discovered something worrying: black holes can "mate" repeatedly. The signals from GW241011 and GW241110 proved that "second-generation" objects exist in space. This means that two ordinary black holes merged, creating a larger one, and then this "daughter" continued a new catastrophic collision course. This behavior breaks the classical model according to which a black hole is merely the corpse of a massive star. When such giants collide, they turn into "standard candles."
By knowing the exact distance from the point of collision, astrophysicists calculate the Hubble constant - the rate at which the Universe is receding and expanding. Understanding this rate will help us understand whether eternal expansion awaits us or a collapse into a single point, as predicted by the theory of cycles of civilizations. "Gravity detectors require pinpoint accuracy. The slightest vibration in the ground can ruin the settings, so detecting signals at such distances is a triumph of engineering," noted Dmitry Lapshin.
The Hawking test
The event GW250114 was the great moment of the late Stephen Hawking. His area theorem states that the surface of a black hole cannot shrink. The signal from the two black holes - of 34 and 32 solar masses - confirmed that the surface of the "event horizon" increased after the merger. The hole rang like a bell, emitting energy in waves, but at the same time became colder. A paradox? No, pure thermodynamics. Researchers from LIGO-Kagra-VIRGO emphasize that we are only at the beginning. The fifth phase of observations will begin in 2028, allowing us to look even deeper into the past. Perhaps there we will find traces of the energy processes that fueled the Universe in the first seconds of its existence.
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