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Back Two merging black holes

Two merging black holes


Date: 21 May 2019
Depicts: Artist's impression of two black holes
Copyright: ESA

Artist's impression of two black holes that are spiralling towards each other and will eventually coalesce. Black hole mergers are extremely energetic events that release gravitational waves – fluctuations in the fabric of spacetime.

Since 2015, the ground-based LIGO and Virgo observatories have been detecting high-frequency gravitational waves from pairs of colliding compact objects such as black holes and neutron stars. ESA's future mission, LISA, will detect gravitational waves from orbit, looking for the low-frequency fluctuations that are released when two supermassive black holes merge and can only be detected from space.

Last Update: 1 September 2019
13-Mar-2026 23:45 UT

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