Scientists have identified ripples in space -time by the violent conflict of two huge black holes that spirally clashed with each other far beyond the distant edge of our galaxy.

Black holes, each with mass greater than 100 times the mass of the sun, began to rotate each other long ago and eventually clashed with each other forming each an even more bulky black holeabout 10 billion light years away from Earth.

The event is The most massive black hole merger ever recorded by gravitational wave detectors and forced physicists to review their models for how huge objects are formed. The signal for the collision was recorded when it reached the detectors on Earth, which are sensitive enough to detect vibration in space thousand times smaller than the width of a proton.

“These are the most violent events we can observe in the universe, but when the signals reach Earth, they are the weakest phenomena we can measure,” said Professor Mark Hanam, head of the Institute of Gravity Explorer at the University of Cardiff. “Until these waves reach the earth, they are tiny.”

The data on the black hole collision arrived shortly before 2 pm The United Kingdom Time on November 23, 2023, when two US -based detectors in Washington and Louisiana, operating by the Laser Syntime Symbol Observatory (LIGO), were activated simultaneously.

The sudden spasm in space -time caused the detectors to stretch and be compressed for a tenth of a second, a fleeting moment that recorded the so -called ringdown phase as the merged black holes formed a young man who hit before.

The analysis of the signal revealed that the conflicting black holes had 103 and 137 times the mass of the sun and rotated about 400,000 times faster than the Earth, near the theoretical limit for objects.

“These are the highest masses of black holes we have measured with certainty with gravitational waves,” said Hmann, a member of LIGO scientific cooperation. “And they are strange because they are in the range of masses where, due to all kinds of strange things, we do not expect black holes to form.”

Most black holes form when huge stars run out of nuclear fuels and collapse at the end of their life cycle. The incredible dense objects deform spacetime so much that they create a horizon of events, a limit within which light cannot escape.

Physicists in Ligo suspect that the black holes that merged were the same products of previous mergers. This would explain how they became so bulky and why they rotated so quickly, as the merged black holes tend to give rotation to the object they create.

Scientists have detected about 300 black hole mergers from the gravitational waves they produce. Until now, the most massive known merger has produced a black hole with a mass of about 140 times the mass of the sun. The last merger produced a black hole with mass up to 265 times larger than the sun. Details will be presented on Monday at the Gr-Amaldi meeting in Glasgow.

Prior to the construction of the first gravitational wave detectors in the 1990s, scientists could observe the universe only through electromagnetic radiation, such as visible light, infrared and radio waves. The gravitational waves observatories provide a new image of the universe, allowing researchers to see events that were otherwise hidden.

“Usually, what happens in science is that when you look at the universe in a different way, you discover things you didn’t expect and your whole image is transformed,” Hanam said. “The detectors we have designed for the next 10 to 15 years will be able to see all black holes in the universe, and maybe some surprises we didn’t expect.”